General Practitioners

• Immunizations
  Classic past life dream, like the one I just quoted, is easy to recognize, because it feels more like a memory than a dream. It is set apart from other dreams through its realism and its lack of symbolic content; in addition, it has often the trappings of a different century or country. The dreamer is either identified with the main character, as I was in this dream, or he or she is present only as an observer. The observer role of the dreamer is characteristic of many past life dreams and can actually help to identify them as such. Psychologically speaking, the observer position represents a form of dissociation, which protects the dreamer from getting re-traumatized by the re-enactment of a disturbing past life event. The perspective from which the past life event is observed is often an unusual one. Most of the time, the dreamer looks on from the bird’s eye perspective, but he can also be watching from another strange vantage point. In one of my past life dreams, for instance, I saw a young woman take her own life by drowning herself in a river. I was observing the suicide from the bottom of the river. Typical of the observer position is the inner conflict the dreamer feels. He gets emotionally involved, would like to stop the course of events, but knows at the same time that any such attempt would be futile. The following dream, which illustrates this quite well, is taken from one of the case studies in my book, the story of a Christian Brother with a celibacy problem who fainted whenever he dad to stand in line for a mass vaccination...

Psychiatrists

• Depression
• Mental Health
  I started seeing patients under supervision in 1975 while I was in training with the Guild of Psychotherapists in London (see About Me). Since that time I have been continuously practicing psychotherapy without ever seeing clients back to back. With a small private practice, I have been spared the dreaded burnouts that tend to afflict mental health professionals who work around the clock. I have also been in a position to go deeper than others and to individualize my treatment approach.
• Psychiatry
  I had my first past life dream in 1976, at a time when I was neither philosophically nor psychologically prepared for such an experience. I was then in my early forties and had never given reincarnation or an afterlife any thought. As a matter of fact, I had more than enough on my plate trying to make sense of my present life, which had not been easy. Childhood trauma from air raids in Berlin during the Second World War, a nervous breakdown while I was working on my doctoral thesis in Heidelberg, and a crippling psychosomatic illness that had developed while I was teaching at Reading University in England, had brought me into a Jungian analysis in London, which lasted five years. During this time I was flooded with dreams and kept a meticulous dream record. Since my analyst - whose background was in psychiatry - did not know how to interpret dreams, I was forced to learn to do it myself. Difficult as that was, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it saved me from being indoctrinated into a particular dream theory, and gave me the opportunity to find the “royal road to the unconscious” all by myself. So when the past life dream struck me out of the blue in 1976, during the last year of my London analysis, I was familiar enough with my inner figures - shadow aspects, animus figures and universal archetypes - to be able to instantly recognize it as something completely different...
• Insomnia
• Anxiety