I woke up the other night from a vivid dream to find Meow perched on my head and King whimpering to be let out. I dreamed that I was swimming in a large pool of water. Suddenly, the water began to turn gray, dark. Out of the blue, the sky began to rain down pages filled with words, clearly torn out of books. As soon as the pages hit the water, the water turned to dust and I awoke.
As a Pisces, my dreams often include water. The pages represent my introspective nature and my 12th house of hidden matters—the secrets to life. This dream has reinvigorated my passion for knowledge, which is often overlooked in my busy life. I have spent most of my free time this week on the couch reading. I grew up surrounded by books and find it ridiculous that people don’t read books these days. I cannot bear to stare at a screen for longer than an hour. I just missed the dot-com decade. I attended NYU in the ’90s and luckily, or at least I think so, was not dependent on a computer for a quick fix. In fact, I actually enjoyed reading and taking copious notes.
The work of the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung has always fascinated me. His books Psychological Types and Psychology and the Unconscious were revolutionary, and in many ways, he (along with my late grandmother, Irene) led me to my chosen career. He is known to have used both astrology and psychology to help his patients. I had always been interested in psychology and astrology as separate entities and was excited to find out that they could be interdependent.
I found myself particularly intrigued by his interpretation of symbols and his interest in how astrology predetermines elements of our personality. He pulled from religion and mythology to interpret human unconsciousness, concluding that we all share a collective unconscious (societal norms) as well as a repressed personal unconscious. He was also credited with discovering extroverted versus introverted personality traits.
Astrology interprets predetermined traits, while psychology analyzes how the external environment affects the individual. This codependence is a testament to my life and work. I am fascinated by Jung’s work precisely because he was the first to integrate astrology into his psychoanalysis. If I’d never come across his work, I may not have become an intuitive astrologer.
We are born at a given moment in a given place and like vintage years of wine we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything else.
—Carl Jung
I’m curious how you became interested in astrology. Was it something you read? Someone you met?
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