218 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
instructive. Often my dreams have given clear and sound advice
about practical matters. Years ago, when I was in crisis, I found
myself in the office of a psychotherapist. I saw him three times and
had clear misgivings about him. I didn’t trust him. Of course, when
I voiced this concern, I got the standard Catch-22 response: “Yo u
have trust issues and you will have to work through them with
me.” This left me in a very uncomfortable position. The “expert”
was telling me that I needed his help, but I didn’t trust the expert.
After my third visit, I went to bed wrestling with this issue and had
a dream in which I was instructed to check the Biblical passage,
Job 12:17. Curious, I looked it up and found these words: “He
makes fools of counselors and judges.”
I interpreted this message as a clear signal to end the relation-
ship. My unconscious was telling me that this counselor was a fool.
I stopped seeing him. The result? Several months later I learned
that a professional review committee had censored this therapist
for molesting female patients.
That’s why I use red ink to record dreams. I suppose this prac-
tice is a bit like publishers using red ink to highlight the words of
Jesus in the New Testament. Dreams represent wisdom from a
higher, vaster source—maybe divine, maybe the Jungian “univer-
sal mind” that Lear spoke of.
Still another use of the four-color pen is for mindmapping. I do
all my brainstorming on 14-by-11-inch sketch pads. I place the
project name in the center—a workshop, speech, article, business
plan, industry review, whatever—and then begin to dump my ideas
on the page, however they occur to me. Sometimes the pattern is
chronological, as with a workshop outline, but sometimes it is
random, as in an industry review. I use colors to help organize the
information. If I am co-leading a workshop, I can use two colors
to represent the material that I might present versus the material
presented by my partner. Red often indicates audience participa-
tion, some activity that the group will do. With this technique, I
can see, just by the colors on the page, whether I have a good balance14-25 ware 218 1/19/01, 1:17 PM