{"id":5303,"date":"2012-11-24T16:00:42","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T21:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=5303"},"modified":"2012-11-24T16:01:03","modified_gmt":"2012-11-24T21:01:03","slug":"peter-jacksons-secret-handshake-from-hobbit-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2012\/11\/peter-jacksons-secret-handshake-from-hobbit-country.html","title":{"rendered":"Peter Jackson’s secret handshake from Hobbit country"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Peter Jackson at the premier of The Return of the King in Wellington NZ<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the New York Times<\/em> reports in a fascinating long article<\/a> today, “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson has created a private empire for himself in his native New Zealand. The government treats him like royalty and is marketing the country to the world tourism industry as Middle Earth. Air New Zealand has airbuses flying with Lord of the Rings livery. When Jackson decided to turn a few remote and hilly acres into a set, New Zealand military engineers turned up the next morning to build access roads, leading incredulous locals to say that Jackson now commands the NZ Army.<\/p>\n

Buried in the depths of the article is the account of one of those secret handshakes from the universe that can be so guiding and confirming in life, if we recognize them and navigate by them. Still far from mega-success and short of seed money, Jackson was touring a moldy, dilapidated former paint factory, wondering whether this could really be the base for his soaring ambitions: to turn the Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy into a brilliantly original and hugely successful series of movie epics.<\/p>\n

Jackson had already poured a lot of his own money into the project, and the long-mothballed paint factory had the look and smell of a money pit. As he toured the premises with his partner Fran Walsh, an Oscar-winning screenwriter and producer, they found something they took to be a strong go-ahead signal. Someone had left behind an old paperback book. It just happened to be Lord of the Rings<\/em>. Jackson recalls, “We looked at each other and said, we’ll take it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the New York Times reports in a fascinating long article today, “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson has created a private empire for himself in his native New Zealand. The government treats him like royalty and is marketing the country to the world tourism industry as Middle Earth. Air New Zealand has airbuses…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,25,8],"tags":[1523,1520,1818,1521,1522],"class_list":["post-5303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coincidence","category-conscious-living","category-synchronicity","tag-hobbit","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-peter-jackson"],"yoast_head":"\nPeter Jackson's secret handshake from Hobbit country - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2012\/11\/peter-jacksons-secret-handshake-from-hobbit-country.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Peter Jackson's secret handshake from Hobbit country - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As the New York Times reports in a fascinating long article today, “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson has created a private empire for himself in his native New Zealand. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5303"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5308,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303\/revisions\/5308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}