About Me

I earned my undergraduate degree from UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) in 1982, where I confirmed my calling to become a Jungian analyst through a careful study of my dreams and support from several significant relationships in life, with teachers, psychotherapists, and mentors. After graduating from UCSC, I earned my master's degree in clinical psychology from John F. Kennedy University (JFKU) in 1987, where I wrote my thesis on Vocational Dreams. I later earned a PhD from Rosebridge Graduate School (Rosebridge) of Integrative Psychology in clinical psychology in 1994. I became a certified Jungian analyst at the San Francisco Jung Institute in 2018. 

Dream Research         

Vocational dreams formed the blueprint for my BA thesis at UCSC, my MA thesis at JFKU, and my Doctoral Dissertation research at Rosebridge. It was an early interest that has never left me since I read Jung’s 1932 essay “The Development of the Personality.” Writing and publishing my 2024 book Vocational Dreams: Calling Archetypes and Nuclear Symbols became my main business, my central study in life since the age of twenty-four. Everything revolved around it from then onwards, although I did not know what form it might take. My calling to teach vocational dreams began in 1980 at UCSC and continued to emerge during my research at JFKU, from 1985 to 1987. I then taught courses on vocational dreams at the Career Development program at JFKU’s School of Management from 1989 to 1995, and I now teach candidates “The Development of the Personality” at the CG Jung Institute of SF, and have taught Vocational Dreams to the general community at the SFJI's Library. In a dream from 1985 the core variable I was searching for in my objective data at JFKU began to become transparent in the mirror-reflections of my own inner dreamscape where my dream-ego said: "I believe the vocational dream is the single most important bit of data any clinician can gather from his or her patients." At this time of my master’s thesis research at JFKU, I had already found the core variable in my research that would become central to my hypothesis, namely the connection between vocational dreams in early adulthood and what I called the nuclear symbol. In the dream I said it with great conviction, even though I was not seeing patients in analysis yet. The central correlation in my study―the nuclear symbol in childhood―was corroborated in my cross-cultural research of anthropological studies in indigenous North America, and it appeared similarly, in my qualitative data of ten interviews with adults. In each study there was a direct correlation. The important thing for the reader to grasp about vocational dreams is that when they come we are not sure about their prospective aspect because the meaning has not been born out of them yet. The synchronicities that are emergent concomitant with them regardless of time, suggests, moreover, their eternal aspect. Time and space are relativized by the absolute reality of vocational dreams and their core symbolisms. The meaning must be fleshed out in full to give the researcher confidence for empirical research purposes. This is one of the benefits of vocational dreams: they put us back into tune with the natural rhythms of Nature and the Self.                                                                                                                     

Working with Vocational Dreams Analytically      

Dreams of vocation are instinctually and spiritually patterned by a harmonizing function in the psyche. There are four principal functions of vocational dreams. 1) The first function of vocational dreams is to help us clarify where the source of our pain is, our neurotic suffering. 2) The second function of vocational dreams is to help us find ways to accept our suffering by discovering the meaning in our suffering. 3) The third function of vocational dreams is to stabilize the body and psyche, synchronize our finite existence with the infinite, create a link between time with eternity, and connect us with the spirit and Nature in a grounded way. 4) The fourth function of vocational dreams is to harmonize our material and social drives in movement towards increasing spiritualization in transit towards a goal or destination. These four functions of calling dreams can help us affirm our suffering and fate, increase physical and emotional health, increase our success in employment and relationships, accept our aging process, infirmity, and our approach to death. They can increase self-esteem by helping us crystallize our personal and cultural identity into a consciously integrated whole that makes our suffering conscious of itself and reveals pathways to numinous experiences, which, as C.G. Jung wrote, can help free us from the curse of pathology.                                              

Vocational Dreams as Doorways to the Self      

I view vocational dreams as doorways into the deeper part of a person, including the archetypal levels of Being. They can become portals to enlarge elements of our personalities, by virtue of our callings. Vocational dreams are doorways, therefore, into the Self and Nature, psyche and Cosmos, God and the soul. Moreover, vocational dreams seek to put us on our right path to the Self in whatever field of work you might be engaged in at any particular moment in time. If a person can discover through dreams their primary link to the Self in this moment, then doorways in your subjective world might open up to worlds beyond. Vocational dreams can point the ways to wholeness by charting paths into your future. They do not tell a person which way one should go in life in an invariably fixed or predetermined way. Their aim is to convey hints about the nature of your calling, which can never be fully known. In my 2020 book William James and C.G. Jung: Doorways to the Self, I examined Jung’s 1915 dream of Philemon as evidence for the probable existence of an absolute Self evidenced in his individuation. The appearance of Philemon was a prevision of Jung’s future. When Jung saw Philemon in his dream he appeared as a winged being sailing across the sky. He held a bunch of four keys in his hands, one of which he clutched as if he were ready to open a lock (MDR, 182, 183). The motif of the four keys is highly significant in light of what I wrote about vocational dreams as doorways to the Self. For Jung, Philemon held the keys to four doorways. What might these four keys represent? We live in a world that is informed by science and today, no one places much faith in a study that cannot be verified and grounded in statistical facts. As Meister Eckhart said: "Intuition, with the key of Peter, unlocks and goes in and finds God face to face" (EFP, 1: 74-75). On the other hand, the advent of modern science has placed a doubt on the validity and viability of spiritual experiences, precognitive dreams, premonitions, or exceptional mental states. Vocational dreams are not tangible realities from which hypotheses can be easily generated without objective observer reliability. One has to be able to prove that results of vocational dreams can be empirically demonstrated to produce what William James called “cash value.” How can I cash out on vocational dreams over time? Can I turn my calling dreams into realities, or dream my way to success in the outer world? Can a qualitative concept of number be generated from the study of vocational dreams to compliment the quantitative concept of amount in mathematics? Is there a number sequence that can provide empirical evidence of a rhythmical order to which vocational dreams correspond over time? The number four in Jungian psychology represents wholeness, the four functions of consciousness, all in tact in a grounded ego. In a  Word: Incarnation. Find your vocational keys and unlock the doorways to the Self.