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From The Desk Of Ann Magnuson: “The Way Of The Dream”

At her funniest, musician/actress/performance artist Ann Magnuson skewers pop and celebrity culture like nobody else. And there’s a lot of that skewering on her new album, Dream Girl, Magnuson’s third LP following the strangely underrated The Luv Show and Pretty Songs & Ugly Stories. Magnuson will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Dream on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaXm8Pmc_Nw

Magnuson: Anyone interested in dreams and Jungian psychology needs to track down stunning Canadian documentary The Way Of The Dream. Made in the 1980s (and it shows) by Jungian analyst Fraser Boa (brother of great feminine psychology author and poet Marion Woodman), this next-to-impossible-to-find film provides the best tutorial of dream analysis short of getting a degree at the Jung Institute.

Boa collected dreams from ordinary people, then engages in riveting conversations and in-depth dream analysis with eminent Swiss psychoanalyst and Jungian disciple Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz. A brilliant interpreter of fairy tales and alchemical manuscripts, Dr. von Franz first met Carl Jung when she was 18 and began translating ancient Greek works for him. Their close collaboration lasted until his death in 1961. I fell head over heels with von Franz when I saw The Way Of The Dream. Although she died in 1998, she’s been my spiritual godmother ever since seeing this documentary. And, OMG, I just Googled her while writing this and discovered we both have the same birthday! Synchronicity-a-go-go!

Sadly, The Way Of The Dream has been taken off YouTube, and it’s extremely hard to find on DVD. Double bummer! But there is a book versionand we managed to find a clip of the beginning of the film online. (The foreign title must’ve slipped past the copyright cops.) Bootleg downloads are floating around, too.

Watch it while you can! It’s worth dealing with the bad transfer and frequently un-synced sound. Sadly, this clip doesn’t contain any of specific dream interpretations by von Franz, but she does discuss the basics of dreams and how important they are in our lives.

There are many clips of the incredible Dr. von Franz on YouTube, mostly from a documentary about Jung. The ones about the nature of The ShadowThe Nature Of Evil and Jung’s dream predicting the final end-of-the-world apocalypse are must viewing! Watch them all, read her books (this one in particular) and get to know this extraordinary woman. You and your dreams will be better for it!