Last Fall, I had the opportunity to be one of the first members of the general reading public to crack open the long-awaited reproduction of Jung's Red Book.

This happened while I was in New York visiting my publisher, W.W. Norton, which is also the publisher of The Red Book (and the original U.S. publisher of , I always like to brag). After a meeting with my editor in her office overlooking the New York Public Library, she took me on a wander through the labyrinthine passageways of Norton headquarters to see who we might meet. As it happens, we ran into the director, who excitedly informed me that she'd just received a few advance copies of The Red Book, and I could spend a few hours in a vacant office with one if I wanted. I agreed.

With the door half closed, the shades drawn, and the massive tome in front of me, I kind of felt like that kid in The Neverending Story who locks himself in the basement of his elementary school and is literally transported to a fantastical world of mythical beings while reading an enormous book, also called The Neverending Story. (My apologies to anyone who wasn't eight years old in 1984 and has no idea what I'm talking about.)

Only, in my case, it didn't quite work. I wasn't transported to another world.

A little background: The Red Book is something like a diary, full of writing and drawings, all describing what Jung called, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a "confrontation with the ." In that memoir, Jung describes going on vision journeys and talking to characters inside of his psyche, letting everything come out no matter how weird or twisted it was. He saw some rather disturbing things, in fact, and recorded it all. While doing this, he sometimes worried that he would go mad, but he felt it was his responsibility to go through this process considering it was what he was asking of his clients.

Jung's descendents withheld the book from publication for many decades after his death because he had never made it clear whether he intended for it to be published and, far from being opportunistic as many heirs of the dead and famous are, Jung's descendents have always been careful about following Jung's wishes and vigilantly maintaining his reputation. (Like Jung himself, they were concerned people would come to the conclusion that he was actually nuts). Before the release of The Red Book, a story about how the Jung heirs finally decided to allow it to be published ended up on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and the book received so much buzz that Norton put it through several printings almost immediately. Having read the article and references to the book in Jung's memoir, I was eager to see it.

Unfortunately, my moment with The Red Book coincided with a period of madness in my own life. Well, ‘madness' is a tad melodramatic, but so was I at that time. I'd finished writing my first book after five years of work, the completion of which had been a goal of mine since I was a kid and I was left with the writer's version of . My finger muscles were too exhausted to start up another project and, having fulfilled the entire purpose of my life for the previous 26 years, I was at loose ends. I'd wake each morning with a terrifying existential malaise about the day ahead. Should I go out to breakfast or eat cereal at home? And once I make that decision, what next? Should I go to the barber and have my head shaved? Or just trim my sideburns? And after that? Do I dare turn on my computer? And do I dare eat a peach? Anyways, this is a well-known condition amongst writers, but I can't blame the rest of the population for considering it a very nice excuse for laziness and suggesting I just get a job.

In addition to this existential purposelessness, I was also going through a break up on the heels of a . (I would write my next book about this but Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love beat me to it).

And -- and! -- I had a hangover from drinking into the wee hours with friends in Brooklyn the night before. (Cue the symphony of tiny violins.)

All in all, it was a time in my life where I could barely concentrate on the sidewalk in front of me and there I was with The Red Book, Jung's extremely personal ravings -- um, I mean, vision quests -- written in the idiosyncratic mytho-poetic style of his unconscious that were possibly never even meant to be read by anyone. I remember the drawings. They're amazing!

To be fair, I recall thinking at the time that the writing was intriguing and Jung's unconscious seemed to me a special place. It's a seriously intense place, though, both emotionally and intellectually -- like if Oprah's unconscious and Nietsche's unconscious had a baby unconscious. The words were like raw lava spilling and splashing over me, hot but retaining no shape.

As I stumbled out of the office, my editor's assistant asked me what I thought. "Pretty intense stuff!" I said. "It's good... I think it deserves a second read."

A couple months later, I received my own copy of The Red Book in the mail. I set aside a day to begin reading it, but when that day came, I approached the kitchen table where the gigantic red thing awaited me and couldn't muster up the energy. I became extremely tired at the sight of it, and, like the death scene of Atreyu's horse Artax in The Neverending Story, felt like I was sinking into a swamp of darkness. I retreated to my bedroom and collapsed on my bed, exhausted.

A week later, The Red Book still unopened, I took off to Colorado to visit my parents for the holidays.

"So... what did you think of The Red Book?" I asked my father the first night home. I'd seen it sitting in his basement office. He'd pre-ordered the book over a year before it was published so I knew he'd been one of the first to receive it.

"I haven't read it," he told me.

My father, the , hadn't cracked The Red Book? Sacrilege!

"Why not?" I asked.

"I want to read it," he said, "but every time I think of going over there and picking it up, I remember that Jung always said you have to follow your own inner experiences. And so, at least right now, I feel more compelled to work with my own experience than read about Jung's."

Like Jung, my father has often used various forms of art to spelunk the recesses of his psyche. During this visit home he showed me his latest creations, which he called Dream Cards. Roughly the same shape as Tarot cards, he'd illustrate an image or a figure from a dream and make a picture with words out of it. He'd then laminate the card and add it to his growing deck. He had a couple dozen already.

On one card, he'd written "My neighbour points to the owl" next to a drawing of an arm pointing to, well, an owl. Another said "The evil shadow sets my head afire" and he'd drawn a sinister-looking Jack the Ripper next to a man with his head, well, on fire. Then I came to one that said "Four years to live," which, well, freaked me out. It showed a fortune teller behind a crystal ball with four fingers raised ominously into the air.

"Dad?" I held the card up with a concerned look on my face.

He laughed. "Yeah, that dream scared me too." He admitted he'd woke in a , thinking it might be a literal prophecy. But as he talked over the dream with his analyst, he came to realize it was simply a warning that death was always near -- especially as he entered his seventh decade -- and that if there were still things he wanted to do in his life, now was the time. He told me that he'd started making real changes: his work load a bit, planning trips to places he wanted to go, taking time to just enjoy the day. It was an excellent example, I thought, of how inner experiences and visions can take practical shape in one's life.

During my visit, my father and I went with my stepmother to a touristy mountain town to walk around and shop. Well, they walked and shopped -- I moped. I was still in my moping phase.

We were in a store that sold tiny metal figurines of various Eastern gods and my father was browsing them. One of his longest running creative projects is collecting and painting miniature figurines of almost everything you can imagine, from soldiers to ballerinas to priests and everything in between. Altogether, I believe it may be the largest collection of archetypes that exists in the world.

"Do you have any hobbies?" my dad asked me, interrupting his search, as well as my staring off with a blank expression into the distance. I thought he was just trying to make conversation; he does that sometimes when I'm silent.



"No," I said, and left it at that. Like a petulant teenager.

"Well, maybe you should get one," he said. And I knew what he meant.

When we got back to his house, I decided to give this inner journey thing a shot. I'd done it before as a kid -- meditated on dream figures and such - -so I knew what to do. I sat up straight in my bed and closed my eyes, calling to my unconscious to bring forth an image, a figure, or whatever -- just something to get me out of my rut. And pretty quickly, something did appear -- I saw a giant snake man. It's funny, because I've always been afraid of snakes, but this one wore a Cheshire grin, which made it more frightening and yet comical at the same time. It had arms, too, which it folded behind its head like it was sunbathing on a Florida beach.

"So?" I said, using the voice in my head, and waited.



"You are not who you think you are," snake dude replied, without wiping the smile off his face.

I responded: "Well, who am I?"

And he said: "You will never know."

"Geez, thanks, cocky serpent man."

I wasn't sure where to take this unhelpful inner process of mine, though I had a hunch the takeaway message was that I was just going to have to wait out my moment of ennui.

I then mimicked my father's technique and drew a picture of the Cheshire Reptile with our conversation written next to it. I thought I might start heading back to Unconscious Land on a regular basis and build up a whole deck of conversations with my new friend, similar to what my father had done. But I didn't end up doing that. When I got back home to Toronto, I set the drawing of my smug snake atop my dust-collecting Red Book and carried on as lethargically as before.

Of course, the mistake I'd made was thinking I could just copy my father's method. This hit me recently when I was interviewing Ken Finkleman, a television writer in Toronto who has a first novel coming out. He was talking about the writing process and how he can only work on projects of his own creation. "It can be horrible when you don't hear it," he said. "I can't imagine being a staff writer on a show for somebody else."

"Hear it?" I asked. "Hear what?"

He was a little peeved with my question. "You know what I'm talking about," he said. And it's true, I did. But I wanted to hear him explain it in his words. When pressed, he came up with this tennis metaphor: "When you make contact with the ball and you make it at exactly the right point, you don't feel it... it's just like ‘Wham!' and you get a tremendous amount of pressure and force behind the shot without exerting yourself. If you're off, you put a lot more energy into getting the same effect."

So, the next day I turned on my laptop and started writing. I am, after all, a writer. It was difficult at first - where to begin? - and then I thought ‘Why even bother?' and considered taking a nap. But I remembered that scene in The Neverending Story where Atreyu pleads with Artax to fight against the swamp: "Fight against the sadness, Artax! Artax... please. You're letting the sadness of the swamp get to you," he shouts in a melodramatic pitch. "You have to try, you have to care. For me. You're my friend. I love you. Artax! Stupid horse! You've got to move or you'll die!" Artax can't muster up enough courage, or hope, though, and he drowns.

That scene killed me when I was a kid and still kills me now. So I got my fingers moving and, soon enough, thoughts and scenes and ideas from everywhere came flooding out. My mojo was back. (And you probably thought writing was easy. No, it takes mythological heroes to produce even one sentence). Maybe one day, I'll bind it all into a big red book.



My father is still making his Dream Cards. He sent me an image of one by email not long ago with the words "Inherited " on it. Next to those words was a box labelled ‘father' with a bunch of art tools in it. I haven't asked him how this relates to his own father, but I know that my father instilled in me a sense that the imagination -- or the unconscious, or whatever you want to call it -- is a place worthy of a visit, a place to find inspiration and direction. You just have to hear it and express it in your own language, in your own way.

Also, I might get a job. We'll see.

[Stay tuned for a future blog entry, in which I really do finally read and comment on The Red Book. Unless I get distracted, of course.]