Friday, August 9, 2024. Tuesday and Wednesdays rain cooled down the days and nights to something more convenient and comfortable. The change has been a pleasure; none of that northeastern late summer humidity. But cloudy and grey. And cool.
This week’s subject of Lauren Lawrence’s Society Dreams is Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
Known to the entire world as Jackie. It’s an excellent choice given our “review” this week of JFK JR.: An Intimate Oral Biography which I found both fascinating and insightful, as one who never knew him personally.
You get the feeling in the book’s recollections of her was that despite her huge public life and exposure, she was also a very by the moment a very attentive mother. You see how, as it often is in families, her first born, and like her mother Caroline, was well looked after and attended to. The child, like the mother was very self-reliant. The boy, the second born of course, was a different story, as the boy always is in a family — especially where the first born, the girl, is no-problem.
You also get the feeling that Jackie was a real mother, but careful in her upbringing of her only son. In this week’s Dreams, you see it even more clearly. His was always a strong personality and full of curiosity. Mother had to keep her eye out for him, but carefully, so he’d “hear” her when she approached sensitive subjects with the boy about his Self.
Society Dreams
By Lawrence Lawrence
The Dream: This fragment of a dream recollection was told by Jackie to her stepbrother, Hugh D. Auchincloss III, during the summer of 1950:
“I dreamt we were in a castle, just after walking through the medieval old town of Carcassonne in Southern France, when I imagined myself a grand heroine like Joan of Arc.”
The Interpretation: Symbolically significant, any form of domicile refers to the inner, walled-in private space of the individual, and is considered a reflection of the personality – the more palatial the home, the grander the sense of self.
As such, castles represent a majestic presence, the remoteness of the personality and the wish for a protected, insulated existence. Detached from the mainstream of life, a castle represents a sense of elevation and aloofness, and denotes a certain inaccessibility.
In this view, the ancient medieval old town of Carcassonne is Jacqueline putting up her own walls, protecting her personal space. There are thoughts of defending oneself from those who would dare climb over, from those invaders of privacy. Identifying with a martyr reveals Jacqueline’s romantic nature and imaginative flair for the dramatic, her courageous loyal spirit and innate sense of valor.
Importantly, it reveals a profound gift of prophecy: As Jacqueline Kennedy, she later inhabits a symbolic castle, The White House (code-termed “Castle” in 1963 by the U.S Secret Service Communications Agency), and becomes the ultimate martyr of the 20th century. Astonishingly, the future Mrs. Kennedy’s dream was a prelude to the saintly Camelot era of her invention.
Years later, in 1994, Jacqueline had another prophetic dream in which she visualized a terrible plane crash over water and saw that her son was the pilot. Upon telling her stepbrother the horrible dream, he encouraged her to warn her son not to take flying lessons. Several days later, seated on the sofa of her living room at 1040 Fifth Avenue, Jacqueline begged her son not to fly. Sadly, as we would see five years later that it was to no avail.
For private dream analysis, contact laurenlawrence@aol.com
