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OQ18: Lonely with Emily White
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Is there a person who has never known the eerie distance of isolation and separation, who has never suffered the pain of rejection or the loss of love? Loneliness is an aching void in the center of our being, a deep longing to love and to be loved, to be fully known and accepted by at least one other person.
- James Park
In this episode I speak with Emily White about her memoir Lonely: Learning to Live With Solitude, in which Emily recounts her struggle to comprehend and overcome her chronic loneliness.
In the conversation Emily discusses some of the roots of loneliness and how the existing in the Western societies stigma around the state makes it harder for lonely people to batter loneliness. She also talks about the core differences between loneliness and depression, the difficulty of transitioning from loneliness and how it can be helped and touches upon how experience of loneliness day after day can influence our physiology and behavior.
I close the episode with the track Your Are My Applepie by Northern Safari, which I dedicated to my special friend Andy, who’s always been there for me, even if “there” is a place somewhere in rural England.
The lyrics are written by my friend, a talented writer and an amazingly warm person Anette Skåhlberg.
Episode related resources:
Interactive version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale
Lonely: Learning to Love With Solitude by Emily White
Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John Cacioppo
Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation by Robert Weiss
Professor John Cacioppo on Loneliness (video, Cornell University)
My two favourate lonely tracks:
Lonely Lonely by Feist from Let It Die, 2004
Lonely town by fLako (feat. Dirg Gerner), From Carving Away the Clay– EP, 2011
OQ17: A life of dreams with Dr Dave, Part Three
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Dreams were never designed to be remembered, but they are keys to who we are.
- Jonathan Winson
Episode description:
I continue my conversation with psychologist and podcaster Dr David Van Nuys on dreams and how they can inform our waking life. In this episode Dr Dave and I discuss pre-cognitive and psychic dreams, synchronicities and simple but effective techniques to improve our dream recall.
Dr Dave, host of Shrink Rap Radio Psychology Podcast and Wise Council Podcast, also talks about his podcasting career, its challenges and its rewards.
After the interview I talk about some of the findings of content analysis research, a scientific method for accurately describing what we dream about, conducted by Calvin Hall and Bill Domhoff.
Featured track:
In this episode I play Da Vinci – an ambient track by Mr Marx from his 2006 album Mallorca Charm. Mr Marx, songwriter and producer, moved between the music scenes of Germany and Spain and has now settled in Sweden. His first release after a break of 8 years, a Nu-Jazz styled instrumental, will come out on Stereolovers.com in Feb/Mar 2012.
Episode related resources:
The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why We Dream by Andrea Rock
Dream Bank Search Engine
OQ16: A life of dreams with Dr Dave, Part Two
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Episode description:
I continue the conversation with Dr David Van Nuys on dreams and how they can inform our waking life. In this episode Dr Dave talks about dream work in groups helps us to get to a deep level rather quickly and builds trust and intimacy through sharing dreams, how keeping a dream journal allows us to see how our dreams evolve over time and how nightmares can help us overcome the fears in our waking life. Other issues Dr Dave touches upon are the difference between the imaginary and the imaginal and Jung’s idea of the Big Dream.
Dr Dave also gives me some suggestions as to how I can continue working with the dream I share on the program, using the method outlined by Robert Jonson in his book Inner work. He also comments on my dream using the If– this-were-my-dream approach.
After the interview I share how not listening to the inner wisdom that came through another dream, led me to more unnecessary suffering and hurting. Because of the somewhat sensitive situation around the dream, I chose to not share it with Dr Dave on the show, neither did I take the time to work with the dream on my own. In the waking life I chose to remain passive and ending up in the exact situation the dream had been warning me for.
Featured music track:
To celebrate the irony in our lives, I play my first day with a moustache, another track from Baasztian’s latest album diagnosis: chronically ironic.
Episode related resources:
Inner work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination For Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson
Dream work: Techniques for Discovering the Creative Power in Dreams by Jeremy Taylor
#290 of Shrink Rap Radio: Ally work with Jungian analyst Jeffrey Ruff
#289 of Shrink Rap Radio: Jung and holding the opposites with Jon Jackson
#204 of Shrink Rap Radio: Nightmares as a tool for personal growth with Anne Hill
#199 of Shrink Rap Radio: The secret history of dreaming with Robert Moss
OQ15: A life of dreams with Dr Dave, Part One
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Episode description:
Do you ever get a feeling that your dreams are trying to tell you something important? Do you want to establish communication with the unconscious? In the next few episodes I talk dreams with “Dr Dave”, also known as David van Nuys, Ph.D. Dr Dave is the host of the popular Shrink Rap Radio Psychology Podcast, taught the course Myth, dream and symbol at Sonoma State University for a number of years, has been a member of a dream group for over three decades and has interviewed many specialists on the fascinating subject of dreams on Shrink Rap Radio.
In Part One of the conversation Dr Dave sets up the foundation for talking about dreams providing the background on Freud’s and Jung’s contribution to the field and describing briefly how the two big minds explained the dreams’ language of visual metaphors and symbols that is sometimes hard to understand and take seriously. Dr Dave also reflects on where dreams come from and what lies at the roots of our thoughts.
After the conversation, I give a brief summary of how Freud and Jung saw the function of dreaming and take a few minutes to introduce other theories that try to give us some clues as to why we dream.
More info about the guest:
David van Nuys, Ph.D, is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Sonoma State University and served as that department’s Chair for seven years. He has also taught psychology at the University of Montana, the University of Michigan, and the University of New Hampshire. He runs a market research consulting business, hosts Shrink Rap Radio Psychology Podcast and Wise Council Podcast and in 2001 co-authored the book, This is the Zodiac Speaking: Into the mind of a serial killer, in which he profiles the murderer in this famous, unsolved case. HBO picked up an option on the book with the idea of possibly using it as the basis for a mini-series. Over the years David, who is also a father of three, has been involved in ham radio, sport judo, freight train hopping, folk guitar, piano, didjeridu, sky diving, flying sailplanes, windsurfing, mountain biking, road cycling, motorcycles, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, and Tai Chi.
Featured music track:
Although technically Baasztian is not a “musician from Sweden”, I think he is more than qualified to be part of the show: I met him in Uppsala through the department of psychology (coincidence?), he happens to have a Master’s degree in cognitive psychology (the plot thickens!) and is now doing his Ph.D. in psycholinguistics, the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language (just cool!).
I close the episode by killing lew wallace – the track from Baasztian’s latest album diagnosis: chronically ironic. Of course, I inquired what Baasztian himself thought about the somewhat violent lyrics and to what degree they they might have to do with his repressed desire for violence but fortunately this seems to be the case when lew wallace is simply lew wallace.
We will hear more from Baasztian’s album as I continue my conversation with Dr Dave in the following episodes. I feel that just like our dreams, Baasztian’s latest album can be explored from different perspectives. For one thing, it offers a variety of cross-cultural and musical references and reflects his humor.
Episode related resources:
Shrink Rap Radio Psychology Podcast with Dr Dave
Inner work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination For Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson
Revonsuo, A. (2000) The Reinterpretation of Dreams. An evolutionary Hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), (877–901)









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