Active Imagination

Eleven years before my father was born, but on his birthday, FDR signed into law the Works Progress Administration.  While many people know about the musicians, actors and media makers that were given work through this program, far fewer know about the Dream Committees that were established in every major metropolitan area of America. These committees employed a cross-section of the local dream-interested public to collaboratively respond to local dreams by creating literal archives, performances, publications and recordings that materialized these dreams in ways that could sustain the local communities.

By 1950, only 15 of these Dream Committees were still functional and a special budgetary line item was added to the standard congressional budgeting protocols providing that each of the recipient Committees continued to produce these annual archival dream responses.  The vast majority of the Committees had been lost due to the virulent arguments regarding the opposing ideals of Freud, Jung and Lacan as pertains to dream interpretation between the years of 1943-1950.

Of these remaining 15, only 6 continue to function as of 2019.  THE SIMULTANEOUS PERFORMANCE, a feature-length, independent film was produced as the 80th installment of the Canton Ohio Dream Committee (productivity was waived during some of the years of World War 2).

This five-member committee has been continuing the tradition of responding to dreams using Jung's "Active Imagination" for 73 of those years and even though there were serious questions about the feasibility of last year's project, the film was screened to an audience of just over 30 people including several family members and friends related to the independent film crew, the actors and the five-member committee, whose identities have remained adamantly obscured despite intense scrutiny from occasionally inquisitive members of the local press.

Despite playing a major role in the storyline of THE SIMULTANEOUS PERFORMANCE, neither Emma Thompson nor Martin Short were in attendance this year.

According to Wikipedia, accessed March 3, 2020, Active Imagination as understood and championed by Jung is a "technique wherein the contents of one's unconscious are translated into images, narrative or personified as separate entities...This often includes working with dreams and the creative self via imagination or fantasy."   

Today's thing of value is Therapeutic Processes that draw on Creativity and Imagination - specifically Active Imagination.

#50 things of value