The Dream Healer

Presented by the UBC School of Music, Theatre at UBC, and the Chan Centre

UBC Opera Ensemble
UBC Symphony Orchestra
David Agler, Conductor
Nancy Hermiston, Director

Guests artists: Judith Forst, John Avey, Roelof Oostwoud

The Dream Healer is based on Timothy Findley’s Pilgrim. Focused on Carl Jung at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich, it is a story about disintegration of the psyche.

Early in the opera, Pilgrim’s friend, Lady Sybil, asks Jung about disintegration as a symptom of schizophrenia and whether reintegration of the fragments is possible.

Replies Jung, “Sometimes we have to accept that things break into pieces.”

“And then?” she asks.

“‘And then'” becomes a journey to integrate the real with the unreal, the supposed with the unimaginable, so that new understandings of the human condition are possible.

Carl Jung sought a healing bridge between the known and the unknown worlds of the human mind. This is not just a work of biography, but also about social issues relating to total health – a concept that Jung so amazingly pioneered by broadening our understanding of healing to include not only science but also the humanities and the arts.

Read program notes, reviews and other related material here.