the dream manifested itself

several months ago i had a strange dream about an acquaintance from almost ten years ago. i blogged about it (#3 in the list) here.

This woman i worked with was always very sweet and it was really hard to see her become a full-on heroin addict and lose her job and it get kind of ugly and then she disappeared. Anyway... i always wondered what happened to her. had the dream in august. Guess what?! yup. She approached me this afternoon from behind with "hey, i think i know you". She seemed good, looked good, good spirits, definitely no longer a user - or at least not like before. Hair was a little graying but she told me she was still making art and just quit her fulltime job and was working with a place called landmark educaton and asked me to come to this open house tonight etc. I said i would look into it on the web later. whatevs. Told her what i'd been up to and all that jazz. It was REALLY great to see her in good health and she seemed happy to run into me too. But it does freak me out - because of the prescient dream, but that may be just coincidence.

So, I looked up Landmark Education. It's that crazy self-empowerment cult aka "the forum". UGH. This is a seminar that supposedly changes your life in one weekend and 500$ - with group disclosure of past, journaling, emotional purging, that kind of thing but in public with a group of strangers. I have some friends that nagged me about this thing years ago - like 'you are the perfect candidate' etc. (i have tried to not be insulted. they also nagged some of my other friends and we were all like - are we so fucked up seeming? so not together?) So i am sort of saddened to hear that this person is involved with this thing. It does not bode well in my book.

My thoughts on self-empowerment, etc. Their term is transformation. The idea of the forum when you read about it on the website seems fine and dandy. but. transformation and change are things that one has to work on every day, little by little. a blow out weekend of crying and journaling may feel like something but it won't last. god, that sounds cynical, but it just seems like a waste of a weekend. the goal is to keep focused, right, keep the head and the heart open. It's a practice, right? I am jsut suspicious of these kind of "seminars" - a big part of their program (from what I understand from a friend who attended at the urging of the other friends) is that they REALLY encourage you to get other people to attend subsequent seminars. Enough said.
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