Gloria Vanderbilt, holding an image from The Red Book, seated next to Andrea Fiuza Hunt at the Rubin Museum of Art. Photograph by Michael J. Palma.

The first snake Gloria Vanderbilt ever met belonged to her son Anderson Cooper, who called the creature Sam. One day, sitting by the pool, Vanderbilt recalls, a young Anderson looked down at his slithering pal and asked, "Oh, Sam—is this all just a dream?"'

Vanderbilt—the heiress, writer, actress, and artist—was reminiscing aloud to a full auditorium last night at the Rubin Museum of Art, in New York City. She was a featured guest in “The Red Book Dialogues,” the museum's series of discussions dedicated to the vast body of work produced by Carl Jung, the late Swiss psychiatrist and the father of analytical psychology. Among the other participants in the Rubin series, which concludes on January 24, are David Byrne, Alice Walker, Cornel West, and John Patrick Shanley, to name only a few.

After mounting the stage, Vanderbilt was handed a covered image from the famous The Red Book, which is full of Jung's illustrations paired with text. Vanderbilt had never seen the book before. Sitting across from Vanderbilt was psychoanalyst Andrea Fiuza Hunt, who was on hand to walk her guest through the Jungian experience, hopefully enlightening Vanderbilt, and her audience, in the process."I come to this like an egg newly hatched," Vanderbilt told the crowd as the conversation started. As she opened the book, a projector covered the large wall behind the dais with a Jung image—a kaleidoscopic, otherworldly landscape in the shape of an egg; below a bright star at the egg's apex were a turtle, a snake, and a creature that was, in various turns, a rhino, a lion, and a "beast-thing."

After asking Vanderbilt, a remarkably youthful 85, to describe her initial reaction to the image before her—"point to where you feel the star on your body"—Hunt encouraged her guest to initiate a dialogue with an orange snake peeking up from the egg's lower line. "Who are you?" Vanderbilt asked the painted snake, after a pause.

Talk turned to dreams and fantasies, two things that have long fascinated Vanderbilt. And she described meeting God, twice, after being given nitrous oxide during the births of her sons—a "gateway to the fourth dimension," she said of the gas. Vanderbilt also spoke of hypnagogic hallucinations, which she thought realer than real, and two recurring dreams: one involving three unknown figures lying in a French sleigh bed, and another more sinister dream about her late husband, Wyatt Cooper, in which he's alive and unreachable. "I dream a lot," she said.

VF Daily called Vanderbilt to follow up on the event. And after a few bars of "Come Fly Away" played while we were on hold, our party was reached at last.

VF Daily: When did you first become interested in the work of Carl Jung?

Gloria Vanderbilt: I've been interested all my life, really. Ever since I can remember. I wish that it had come to pass that he had been my therapist. He's the only therapist that deals really in fantasy and dreams, and in that area.

When did you first start seeing an analyst?

I was interested in finding out things about myself. I actually don't believe in therapy now. My therapist, who subsequently lost his medical license, and also my lawyer—they defrauded me of my business [nearly $2 million], and it was quite an experience. And also I've come to the point where I really know enough about myself that life is good, you know?