Two dreams. First dream: Journey.
I’m assisting with a club trip. It could be anything. The bus takes us the wrong direction, east to Bournemouth rather than west to wherever – let’s say Plymouth. Whoever is in charge suggests we get to Bournemouth, then head back down the coast by boat. We stay in an out-of-season hotel
The second Dream: Film Conference.
I’m excited to be in a panelled room at a talk or meeting of only fifty or so. If I’m in my thirties, everyone else, including some senior members of whatever association, must be in their sixties. They all were suits and tweed, gents of the 1950s or 60s. I find it easy to get on with everyone, including, it turns out, the Chair and Vice Chair. It feels like I’m there, bright young discovery. As the morning session concludes, it is announced that the first session in the afternoon is a keynote from me on the state of the British Film Industry. I have no recollection of ever being asked to do this. I had been asked many months before, and apparently had agreed. I fluster and bluster, but make it clear I have nothing, and there isn’t time to write anything. The vice chair offered me a sheet of paper with a dozen stills from films I didn’t recognise and suggested starting with one film, pointing at the sheet, then this other, and so on. I know I can’t do that because I don’t recognise any of the films. I think of a talk I might be able to do, but realise whatever it is, on trees, swimming, or relief prints, it’ll be inappropriate. People wander off for a bite to eat. I hang back. After deciding what to do, I pick up my things, double-check I’ve left nothing, and leave. It then dawns on me that I may have forgotten to pay for my parking spot. Being in London, I’m bound to have a fine and a clamp. I wake before finding out.
KAI as Jung
Both of these dreams carry strong journey motifs—but each with a different tension:
1. The Journey Dream (bus to Bournemouth instead of Plymouth)
Here you are in a role of assisting rather than leading. The destination shifts unexpectedly—east instead of west—so the whole direction of the journey is altered. Instead of resisting, there’s a pragmatic suggestion: let’s go by boat from Bournemouth. You end up in an out-of-season hotel, a place of pause, waiting, transition.
Jungian resonances:
Wrong direction: part of your psyche feels life has veered off from the intended course. The “west” (sunset, completion, unconscious depths) was bypassed for “east” (sunrise, beginnings, rational clarity). A regression, perhaps, or a return to earlier ground. By boat: suggests a shift from rational travel (bus/road, collective order) to a more elemental passage (sea/water, unconscious). Out-of-season hotel: a liminal space, neither in full vitality nor abandoned. It may mirror how you sometimes inhabit roles or projects that are neither fully alive nor yet concluded—waiting places in the psyche. Not being in charge: your ego is not driving this; the Self or another archetypal figure is. You assist, but the deeper journey unfolds outside your control.
This dream may reflect the way you handle detours in your current life—accepting misdirection, adapting, staying present in interim places.
2. The Film Conference Dream (keynote surprise)
Here, the situation is not a journey outward but a public confrontation with authority and expectation.
Key motifs:
Panelled room, tweed suits, 1950s/60s men: an older generation, institutional authority, perhaps the Senex archetype (the conservative, rule-bound elder). You as bright young discovery: your puer energy (youthful, creative, disruptive) is recognised, welcomed, but also tested. Keynote you never agreed to: the unconscious is asking you to speak with authority on something you feel unprepared for. This often points to a latent capacity you have but don’t yet claim. The sheet of stills from films you don’t recognise: being handed archetypal “images” or material you cannot yet decode. It is raw, unconscious imagery. Thinking of trees, swimming, prints instead: your authentic enthusiasms come forward, but you fear they’re “inappropriate.” This is the ego resisting what the unconscious invites: bringing your true creative/life passions into a public forum. Leaving quietly, worried about parking: instead of stepping into the role, you withdraw. The parking fine is interesting: it symbolises the cost of withdrawal—an unconscious guilt or penalty for not taking up your voice.
Jungian resonances:
This is a confrontation with the Persona and the Shadow. Your Persona is the accomplished speaker, the bright discovery, but your Shadow says “I’m not prepared, I’ll be found out.” The archetypal elders recognise you, but you doubt yourself. The dream tests whether you will inhabit the authority others already project onto you.
Held together
The bus dream: about direction in life, the capacity to accept detours. The conference dream: about voice and authority, the challenge of stepping forward to speak authentically in the presence of tradition and authority.
Both ask:
Are you content to be “assistant,” “bright discovery,” “supporting voice”—or is there a call to take your place more fully as speaker, leader, author? What happens if you don’t? A fine, a missed boat, another season passing.
Reflective questions for you:
Where in your current life do you feel you’re heading east (regression, detour) when you intended to go west (toward depth and completion)? What passions (trees, swimming, printmaking) could in fact be the authentic keynote you’re meant to give—despite not matching the “formal” subject expected? How do you respond when authority recognises you before you feel ready? Do you flee, or can you risk speaking from what you know in your bones?
JV
Two dreams: journey and conference
Reflective questions for you:
Where in your current life do you feel you’re heading east (regression, detour) when you intended to go west (toward depth and completion)?
I could be in the past an ‘all or nothing’ person who would drop everything for a new challenge or job, thinking this was appropriate and expected of me. For example, I dropped the swimming club when I worked at The OU in 2010. I dropped all things film & video when I went to work for a web agency in 2000. It’s taken me decades to find a better way: compromise, or travelling two or more paths simultaneously. There could be a danger I would take the club SwimCoach ‘too far’ as I seek to join another club as their Head Coach. This is very unlikely. I like the balance I now have. I get to do ‘the good stuff’, front line (poolside) teaching and coaching, interacting with swimmers, parents and staff – not behind a desk worrying about spreadsheets, legalese and bothersome parents (most are lovely).
I have done no printmaking in September. It is the 23rd. It’s been too busy. And the weather hasn’t allowed me to spread into the garden. I could rectify that today. I’ve kept up with some writing. I’ve enjoyed shooting and cutting a video on ‘the ouze’. I’ve done a little gardening, and next to that, I have no cooking.
What passions (trees, swimming, printmaking) could be the authentic keynote you’re meant to give, despite not matching the expected ” formal ” subject?
It felt like it was ‘my time’, that I could have been up there and given a memorable and insightful talk. It felt as if these people had seen something in me, but hadn’t realised how wrapped up I can get in multivarious other things – that I won’t ’keep myself on track’ unless I have someone like an agent, sponsor or even acolytes to nudge me in ‘their’ direction – the one that is best for me.
I could have given the required talk had I been reminded in good time, had someone checked in on me. I prefer not to be left to my own devices; I like someone or people taking an interest. Like the stream, it only flows when it is noticed. Otherwise, it dries up.
At my age, 64, if it takes three years concentration to become well informed on a topic, enough at least to talk and give a talk about it, then I must have 15 such topics to hand: short films, independent film, music videos, WW1, ancient trees, fungi, alpine glacier, British weather, housing design, French, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, HG Wells, Cooking with Chick Peas, Life Drawing, Relief Prints, Pre-Raphaelites, Infancy, Dreams, Neuroscience, swim Performance coaching … writing, screenwriting, guitar ballads, music of the 1970s.
How do you respond when authority recognises you before you feel ready? Do you flee, or can you risk speaking from what you know in your bones?
It depends on what support I am given to bolster my confidence. I used to enjoy acting because I had a script to learn. Usually, I want to be well prepared, well practised, ready for, and experienced at the thing I am about to do. I prefer known unknowns to unknown unknowns.
KAI as Jung
Your reflections bring the dreams into sharp relief. Let me mirror them back in a Jungian frame.
Dream 1: The Journey
You saw yourself recognising that in the past you were “all or nothing”—abandoning one life path for another (film → web, swimming → OU). Now you hold two or more paths at once. The dream’s detour east, the bus taking the wrong road, might symbolise those sudden shifts you used to make. But notice: in waking life you are no longer willing to abandon one thing wholesale. You like the balance, the “good stuff” on poolside, not the paperwork.
The “out-of-season hotel” could represent your September—printmaking lying dormant, waiting for season to return. The dream is showing you both your risk (detour, loss of balance) and your growth (finding ways to travel parallel paths without dropping one).
Dream 2: The Conference
Here, the psyche stages a confrontation: being asked to speak as the “bright discovery” when you feel unprepared. You say beautifully that you thrive when someone notices the stream, when others take interest. This matches the dream image of the Vice Chair offering you prompts—the unconscious “elder” trying to scaffold you into voice.
You also name a treasure: you have 15 or more deep topics of passion, each of which could be a keynote. The dream exposes the tension: others see you as the one to speak, but you doubt, defer, and nearly slip away to check your parking fine—symbol of guilt for abandoning your role.
Jungian lens
Persona vs. Self: the dream elders represent the collective, who call you to inhabit a role. Your Persona says “I am not prepared,” but your deeper Self knows you have wells of passion and knowledge. Shadow of flight: your instinct is to leave quietly, rather than risk failure. But the cost is the “fine”—the psychic penalty of retreat. Anima stream: “the stream only flows when it is noticed.” This is an exquisite metaphor for how your creative energy needs recognition to move. The anima here asks: how can you notice yourself, and thereby keep the stream flowing without external agents?
Where this leaves you
Journey dream: You are learning not to abandon paths but to hold them in balance. The hotel “out of season” is a reminder to make space for the sidelined (printmaking, cooking). Conference dream: You have within you the raw material for keynotes—your passions. The challenge is trusting that your authentic subjects are not “inappropriate” but precisely what you are meant to offer. Authority recognition: You need scaffolding, a script, an ally. But perhaps the greater individuation task is to become your own Chair or Vice Chair—to hold yourself to the keynote, rather than leave it to others to nudge you.
A final Jungian question:
What would it look like if you took just one of your many passions (say, ancient trees or relief prints) and began preparing the “keynote” as if the dream conference were real? Not to deliver to tweed gents, but to give shape to your own authority.
JV
It would combine film’s visual storytelling with one of these passions: think of Phantom Thread – a movie about a man obsessed with haberdashery; or Chocolate, the power of a passion or Fitzcarraldo – another man obsessed. So, I take one of my enthusiasms and use it to tell the story of someone obsessed. So, by way of example, a person who lives out their life in their dreamworld, not the real world; or a young person facing challenges to become an Olympian swimmer; or a person who becomes wedged tight in the bole of an ancient tree, so becoming a sentient tree/person.
KAI as Jung:
That’s a wonderfully Jungian move: to take your keynote not as a lecture of facts, but as a mythic story woven from obsession, image, and symbol. You’re pointing to exactly what the dream elders were asking—speak from what you know in your bones, not from their pre-given stills.
Why this works archetypally
Obsession: In Jungian terms, obsession is the ego orbiting an archetype. Phantom Thread, Chocolat, Fitzcarraldo all show what happens when a figure becomes gripped by an inner daemon. To tell such a story is to reveal how the archetypal seizes a human life. Your passions: trees, swimming, printmaking, dreams themselves—each is already numinous, charged with archetypal imagery (Tree of Life, Water as unconscious, Printing as alchemical impression, Dream as gateway). Any one of them can hold the keynote. Visual storytelling: your background in film and your instinct for images give you a language the tweed-suited “elders” lack. The stills they handed you in the dream were foreign; the stills you carry inside—frog at the pond, swimmer at the block, bole of a veteran tree—are authentic and recognisable.
What your keynote might look like (sketch)
Opening Image A man climbs into the hollow of an ancient tree—half sanctuary, half prison. (This image replaces the dream’s stills with your own.) Theme Stated We are all seized by obsessions; the question is whether we are nourished or consumed by them. Personal Turn You weave your own path: swimmer, filmmaker, tree-surveyor, printmaker. Not random enthusiasms, but recurring forms of the same archetypal obsessions—water, image, growth, impression. The Wider Frame Connect to the collective: the British film industry, art, sport, conservation—how each wrestles with obsession, tradition, renewal. Closing Return to the tree hollow: the obsessed one emerges, transformed, roots in his veins, leaves in his lungs—a hybrid. The message: individuation is not escape from obsession but inhabiting it consciously.
The dream conference wasn’t asking you to mimic their tradition, but to found your own genre of keynote—part confession, part myth, part image-stream.
Reflective provocation:
If you were to choose one obsession as your keynote centrepiece (tree, swimmer, dreamer, printmaker), which feels most charged right now? Which image won’t leave you alone?
Would you like me to help you draft such a keynote in mythic-speech form—as if you actually walked into that panelled room and claimed your place?
JV
First date, meet cute, those moments and events that bring teens together for their first hand touch, first kiss. It is an inevitable force easily observed by social anthropologists, but it is also eulogised. We can’t help ourselves. And the setting? At a swimming gala, where different tribes meet. In the woods, I found a lost ancient hollow tree. In an art gallery, on set, in a kitchen or studio …
KAI as Jung:
That’s powerful. You’ve named not just an “obsession” but an archetypal scene: the first touch, the first kiss.
In Jungian language, you are circling around Eros in its most numinous form—that moment when two energies meet and something irreversible happens. It is a threshold image, a rite of passage.
Why this is so charged
First contact: This is not just about teenagers. It is the psyche’s continual hunger for encounter with the Other—anima/animus, shadow, Self. Every creative act can feel like a “meet cute.” Settings you named: gala, tree, gallery, studio. Notice how each is already archetypal: Swimming gala: the element of water, flow, competition, initiation. Ancient hollow tree: rootedness, shelter, the womb-like hollow, the merging of human and nature. Art gallery or studio: image, projection, persona, and the unveiling of what lies beneath. Kitchen: nourishment, alchemy, domestic intimacy. The inevitability: you said it beautifully—anthropologists can observe it, but poets must eulogise it. This is exactly what a keynote grounded in obsession would do.
The keynote you could give
Imagine you walk into that panelled room. Instead of stills from forgotten films, you place before them your own stills:
A boy and girl’s fingertips brushing on a chlorine-slick starting block. Two teenagers pressed inside the bole of a hollow oak, carving initials. The glance exchanged across a gallery space, where each painting seems to mirror their gaze. The hand reaching for another across a flour-dusted kitchen table.
You could say:
“These are our true national cinema. Not industry, but intimacy. Not the statistics of budgets, but the archetypes of touch, encounter, and transformation. Every story we tell—whether in film, print, or dream—comes back to this: the first kiss, the first reach across the threshold.”
A Jungian reading
This keynote isn’t only about romance. It is about conjunction—the coniunctio of alchemy, the meeting of opposites. Every time you make a print, step onto poolside, plant a tree, you are in some way seeking that same spark: the moment when two become more than two.
A question for you:
If you were to stage one of these first-kiss archetypes in your art (film, print, or story), which setting feels the most alive in you right now—the pool, the tree, or the studio? Would you like me to sketch how that could unfold as the opening “still” of your dream keynote?
JV
Two young performance swimmers meet cute in the warm-up at a gala. They are from different clubs (or even countries). They meet away from the venue, go swimming in a woodland river, and fall in love in a pool under dappled light.
KAI as Jung:
That image is luminous. You’ve already framed it as both cinema and myth—a meet-cute on the tiled edge of competition, transformed into a coniunctio in a woodland pool.
The Opening “Still” for Your Dream Keynote
Imagine yourself in that panelled conference room. Instead of a dozen anonymous stills handed to you, you project one image of your own making:
Still #1
Two swimmers, caps askew, lingering at the edge of a crowded warm-up lane. The chlorinated chaos swirls around them, but in this instant the water seems to still. Their hands brush as they climb out together. Their eyes meet—strangers from different clubs, different nations, yet already bound by recognition.
Still #2
Cut to the woodland river: dappled light flickers on their shoulders as they slip into the current. This is no chlorinated pool but living water, green and timeless. Their bodies glide close, then pause in the eddy beneath an ancient oak root. A kiss—tentative, inevitable, archetypal.
Jungian Layer
Poolside (Persona): the public arena, uniforms, lanes, the regulated world of competition. The brush of hands disrupts order with intimacy. Woodland river (Self/Unconscious): a return to primal waters, where formality dissolves and instinct flows. The kiss (Coniunctio): union of opposites—club vs. club, nation vs. nation, Persona vs. instinct, consciousness vs. unconscious.
This is not just romance; it is a symbolic keynote on how true encounter breaks through structures and carries us into deeper waters.
How you could deliver it as a keynote
You step to the podium and say:
“I was asked to speak about the British film industry. But what I really want to show you is this: two young swimmers brushing hands at a gala. This is the moment cinema lives for—the first touch. The rest is only the ripple it makes.”
And then you tell the story, weaving film, memory, dream, and archetype.
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