Carl and Me-- Marc Bregman's reflections on the Red Book

 Marc Bregman explains how dreams can balance our experience of the depths-- "We are ready when the dreams say we are ready"

ANXIETY IS A SYMPTOM OF THE SOUL

An recent article in The Atlantic points out that "Nearly one in five of us -- 40 million American adults -- suffer from anxiety disorders, the most common class of psychiatric ailment we have." Why is there so much anxiety in our country, more than in other nations with more obvious problems of poverty and disease? The typical approach-- as followed in The Atlantic article, is to look at problems in our society. This turning outward seems logical to people who think in the worldly way. It's a perverse move, because the truth is, there is nothing in the world that supports the soul. Anxiety is a symptom of how separately we live from our souls. We think all our happiness will come from having a good paying job, or achieving a higher status. We worry because we worry about what other people think instead of knowing what the soul is. And then to deal with anxiety, we take a pill. Dreamwork offers a different path. Dreams display reactions and feelings. THey show us how projection operates. Through looking at our dreams we come to understand the difference between anxiety and archetypal fear. The archetypal fear is a deep existential feeling that leads us to the soul. Anxiety is a reaction that disperses or scatters unconscious fear everywhere. Once we project anxiety on to the world, we come under the delusion that we can only solve it in the world. Then we can read the Atlantic and think about the problems with "meritocracy" or structural unemployment. The truth is, even if these problems were solved, we'd still have anxiety. We don't understand that anxiety is simply a surface signal of a deeper reality Instead of projecting anxiety we need to experience our deeper fear. Dreams show us the way.