1969: I was living in Paris, studying to become a Soviet Studies specialist when I had a life-changing dream. Before waking that morning, like most people, I had thought of dreams as entertaining nonsense. I went back to Princeton in Russian Studies but was busy reading about dreams. How could my education have left out a serious exploration of how my, and everyone’s minds work every single night?

At the very end of my junior year, I switched majors the next year and changed my major so that I could dedicate myself to teaching people how to shed dogmatic interpretations and appreciate the immediate, practical applications of dream insights. That summer I spent on an island near Stockholm reading the entire collected works of Carl Jung and writing a junior paper on his work with dreams. In my senior year, I hit upon the core strategies of the Dream Interview and thought there might be a more direct route to understanding dreams than my New York City analyst had shown me. Still, the following year I went to the Jung Institute in Zurich to see if dream interpretation worked better there. Well, I decided not to become a Jungian therapist after that year and was determined to develop a more transparent, client-centered, secular approach to dreaming. A master’s degree and a doctorate in California followed and here I settled in to live and work.