The author studies his own dream of a colleague's death, linking the content of his dream and the actual death of the colleague in his sleep, both of which occurred the same night. Proposing a model of dream construction, the author integrates perception and archetypal imagery. Theories of Jung, Bion, and contemporary consciousness research are employed to illuminate how this dream arose in what the author describes as a non-local, transpersonal, unconscious mind.

This chapter discusses the author's twin careers as a visual artist and psychoanalyst. As an artist, the author describes his imaginative process occurring in a dissociative trance. Artmaking and being a psychoanalytic patient are related practices taking place in an altered state of consciousness and creating an atmosphere where anything is possible. The therapeutic role of imagination in Mesmer's animal magnetist movement, and in Breuer's work with Bertha Pappenheim, is compared with a clinical case in the author's own practice. Using dreaming as its model, the paper argues "imagining the impossible" is the basis of creative growth and therapeutic change. Death, drawing and psychoanalysis My childhood in Wisconsin was formed around my father's suicide. He'd landed at Omaha Beach and left the second world war with a traumatic brain injury. As a boy, wearing his dog tags around my neck, I'd run my fingers around the edges of holes drilled into his skull to relieve the pressure on his swelling brain. I'd ask him to show me again the scars of bullet wounds in his shoulder and back. At night he'd tell me war stories, drinking whiskey from a water glass. Although alcoholism helped, my father's mind couldn't contain the violence of the war. When I was a teenager he threatened to kill us, his wife and two children. I kept a rifle hidden to protect us during his rages. Then, when I was fifteen, he shot himself with a pistol we didn't know he had. My father's suicide shattered our family and, four years later, propelled me a thousand miles to New York. As a child I spent hours drawing. No one else in my family was artistic. By the age of ten my mother began dropping me off at the

Errors are a part of life and clinical mistakes are frequent. The author examines some of the ways that errors or mistakes permeate all areas of life, pointing out their frequency in human interaction, in research, in ordinary judgment, whether in daily largely trivial matters, or in significant matters of life and death. In some instances, a psychoanalyst might point out an unconscious motive for the errors, but in the history of psychoanalysis, clinical errors have often been shown to be beneficial to the treatment, to the extent that they enter into the psychoanalytic discourse. The author presents some clinical material drawn from his work with two supervisees.

It started with a dream of waking up dead in which I hovered over my body disbelieving my death. Frank, my patient in mourning, told me he too dreamt of waking up dead. Then I had a second dream in which I was driving to see my sister when I got a call saying that she'd fallen, and was stricken with brain cancer. That same evening my patient Lily received a call about her sister's deadly brain cancer. Again, someone was at the edge between life and death. Both dreams demonstrate telepathic rapport. Arriving unbidden, telepathic experiences reveal an unconscious mind whose capacities exceed our conscious ability to understand or control it. Telepathic experiences are often frightening. When telepathic moments occur, they're usually pathologized, suppressed and forgotten. Until they happen again, and the process is repeated. Derrida (2007) tells us the consequences of telepathy are profound. Telepathy reveals dimensions of unconscious awareness that transcend space and time. Telepathy destroys beliefs about boundaries between self and other. Therefore, each time telepathy emerges it must be invalidated. Derrida says, "Everything, in our concept of knowledge, is constructed so that telepathy be impossible, unthinkable, unknown" (p.244). Our conscious minds can't tolerate the unconscious, particularly if our unconscious contains the minds of others. This unconscious is literally "alien," to use Freud's expression. Our awareness of it needs to be extinguished and forgotten. Knowledge of trance and telepathic rapport can be temporarily suppressed but these phenomena continuously reoccur. In the middle of the nineteenth century James Braid converted Puysegur's artificial somnambulance into hypnotism. Braid was a physician concerned