These vibrations are not visible and difficult to describe, but still they have a significant influence on the behaviour of a mass of people. When May comes around, with good weather and the cafes have opened their terraces, you will see that the people in the streets walk a little differently and they are in a better mood; everyone can be happy again. And when it is cold outside, people stiffen a little and they shrink back into their coat collars. So the cheerful, nice-weather feeling is generated externally and changes once the weather becomes grey and overcast.

I was born in The Hague, in November 1943. I was just one and a half years old when World War II came to an end in the Netherlands and so I did not consciously experience the war. So how is it possible that, from when I was two and a half to when I was four, I regularly dreamt about the Germans in helmets? They were already long gone, so I did not consciously see them. Yet in my dreams, I saw exactly how the soldiers looked. How could I have noticed that? This was something that baffled me, already at that young age. My family never spoke of the war at home. After all, hadn’t we been liberated? Hadn’t we already begun rebuilding the Netherlands? There were no pictures of soldiers. And still, I had those dreams.

Much later, when I was nineteen years old, I had to be screened for military service. It was then, that I heard from a psychologist working in the psycho-technical department of the navy, that many people born in 1943 didn’t make it through the screening for military service due to their high sensitivity. My sensitivity, too, had tested above the average, certainly for that time, and certainly for boys. Boys were expected to be everything but sensitive. In that time, a man had to be tough. He had to lead in the outside world and was not allowed to be sentimental. He was not to cry. In that time, emotions – in the collectively determined conscious of the Netherlands – were left to the women.