part0006

Our verbal patterns betray many of our automatic assumptions: If one discusses a dream with a friend, the friend is likely to ask something like, “Did that detail really happen, or only in the dream?” The implication is that what happens in a dream is not “real.” In fact, it would be more accurate to ask, “Did it happen in dream reality , or in physical reality? In the world of dreaming, or in the ordinary world?”

Both are genuine worlds, both are realities that truly exist. But the world of dreaming, if we only realized it, has more practical and concrete effect on our lives than outer events do. For it is in the world of dreaming that the unconscious is working out its powerful dynamics. It is there that the great forces do battle or combine to produce the attitudes, ideals, beliefs, and compulsions that motivate most of our behavior.

Once we become sensitive to dreams, we discover that every dynamic in a dream is manifesting itself in some way in our practical lives—in our actions, relationships, decisions, automatic routines, urges, and feelings. We believe ourselves to be in conscious control of these elements of life. But this belief is the great illusion of ego-control. These aspects of our lives are actually determined from a far deeper place. It is in the world of dreaming that their root sources are revealed in a form that we can see and understand.

Dreams express the unconscious. Dreams are dynamic mosaics, composed of symbols, that express the movements, conflicts, interactions, and developments of the great energy systems within the unconscious.

The unconscious has a particular capacity to create images and to use those images as symbols. It is these symbols that form our dreams, creating a language by which the unconscious communicates its contents to the conscious mind.

Just as a burning fire inherently exudes heat, the unconscious inherently generates symbols. It is simply the nature of the unconscious to do so. As we learn to read those symbols we gain the ability to perceive the workings of the unconscious within us. This ability to produce symbols affects more than just our dreams: All of human life is nourished by the flow of symbolic imagery from the wellsprings in the unconscious:

The symbolic imagery of the unconscious is the creative source of the human spirit in all its realizations. Not only have consciousness and the concepts of its philosophical understanding of the world arisen from the symbol but also religion, rite and cult, art and customs. And because the symbol-forming process of the unconscious is the source of the human spirit, language, whose history is almost identical with the genesis and development of human consciousness, always starts out as a symbolic language. Thus Jung writes: “An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.” (Neumann, Great Mother , Inner Work: Seeking the Unconscious)

The image-symbols of the unconscious find their way to the level of consciousness mainly by two routes: dreams and imagination. It is easier to grasp the symbolic quality with dreams, for dreams often present mythical creatures and unearthly situations that would be impossible in everyday physical life. People are usually confused by the dream images until they learn that the images are symbolic and are not to be taken literally.

Since dream images make no sense in ordinary terms, people dismiss them as “weird” or meaningless, but actually, dreams are completely coherent. If we take the time to learn their language, we discover that every dream is a masterpiece of symbolic communication. The unconscious speaks in symbols, not to confuse us, but simply because that is its native idiom.

I was never able to agree…that the dream is a “facade” behind which its meaning lies hidden—a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me, dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can. These forms of life, too, have no wish to deceive our eyes, but we may deceive ourselves because our eyes are shortsighted. Long before I met Freud I regarded the Unconscious, and dreams, which are its direct exponents, as natural processes to which no arbitrariness can be attributed, and above all, no legerdemain. (Jung, MDR , The Four-Step Approach to Active Imagination)

We may compare a dream to a screen on which the unconscious projects its inner drama. We see there the various inner personalities that make up much of our total character, the dynamics among the forces that make up the unconscious. These invisible forces and their activities set off charges, so to speak, that are transmitted onto the screen. They take the form of images, and the interplay of the dream images gives us an exact representation of those inner dynamics that go on inside us.

In learning how to understand these images, our conceptual starting point is our realization that they are not to be taken literally: We learn to look for an attitude, an inner personality, an inner development or conflict that clothes itself in the form and color of this image so that it may be visible to us in the Land of Dreaming.

It baffles many people at first to hear that the imagination is an organ of coherent communication, that it employs a highly refined, complex language of symbols to express the contents of the unconscious. Yet, it is true: If we learn to watch it with a practiced eye, we discover that the imagination is a veritable stream of energy and meaningful imagery flowing from the unconscious most of the time.

We may picture two conduits that run from the unconscious to the conscious mind. The first conduit is the faculty of dreaming; the second is the faculty of imagination. Dreaming and imagination have one special quality in common: their power to convert the invisible forms of the unconscious into images that are perceptible to the conscious mind. This is why we sometimes feel as though dreaming is the imagination at work during sleep and the imagination is the dream world flowing through us while we are awake.

Just as the unconscious gives off charges of energy in the night that create patterns on the screen of the dream-mind, the unconscious also functions during the waking hours. It emits a continual stream of energetic pulses that find their way to the conscious mind in the form of feelings, moods, and, most of all, the images that appear in the imagination. Just as with dreams, the symbolic meanings of the images may be understood by the person who is willing to learn.

The material that flows through the imagination takes many forms, from the frivolous to the visionary. At the bottom of the scale is the passive fantasy : This is the fanciful daydream that flits across the mind at odd times during the day or sometimes distracts us for long periods of time. Such fantasies are mere entertainments or distractions that add nothing to consciousness.

At the top of the scale is the visionary experience , in which Active Imagination and religious encounter merge. Active Imagination is one way of using the imagination constructively to approach the unconscious; there are many other ways, including profound forms of meditation.

Our culture in the twentieth century has a tremendous collective prejudice against the imagination. It is reflected in the things people say: “You are only imagining things,” or, “That is only your fantasy, not reality.”

In fact, no one “makes up” anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate in the unconscious. Imagination, properly understood, is a channel through which this material flows to the conscious mind. To be even more accurate, imagination is a transformer that converts the invisible material into images the conscious mind can perceive.

The root of the word imagination is the Latin word imago , meaning “image” the imagination is the image-forming faculty in the mind, the organ that has the power to clothe the beings of the inner world in imagery so that we can see them. The imagination generates the symbols the unconscious uses to express itself.

A long series of historical and psychological developments over the centuries have produced our current misunderstandings of what fantasy and imagination really are. We haven’t the space here to recall all of those developments, but since the prejudice is so pervasive, it is worth while to look briefly at how fantasy and imagination were understood by our intellectual ancestors, the ancient Greeks.

Our English word fantasy derives from the Greek word phantasía . The original meaning of this word is instructive: It meant “a making-visible.” It derived from a verb that means “to make visible, to reveal.” The correlation is clear: The psychological function of our capacity for fantasy is to make visible the otherwise invisible dynamics of the unconscious psyche.

We find here in the psychology of the Greeks a fundamental insight that modern depth psychology has had to rediscover: The human mind is invested with a special power to convert the invisible realm into visible forms so that it can be seen in the mind and contemplated. We call this invisible realm the unconscious: For Plato it was the world of ideal forms; other ancients thought of it as the sphere of the gods, the region of pure spirit. But all sensed one thing: Only our power to make images enables us to see it.

For the Greeks, phantasía denoted this special faculty in the mind for producing poetic, abstract, and religious imagery. phantasía is our capacity to “make visible” the contents of the inner world by giving them form, by personifying them. The Greeks took for granted the reality of the inner world, expressed as ideal forms or universal qualities that clothed themselves in the divine images of their gods. For them, phantasía was the organ by which that divine world spoke to the human mind. *

In European psychology until at least medieval times, the image-forming capacity called imagination or phantasía was thought of as the organ that receives meanings from the spiritual and aesthetic worlds and forms them into an inner image that can be held in memory and made the object of thought and reasoning. In religion, the imaginative faculty was the legitimate path of religious inspiration, revelation, and experience. The fact that information entered the conscious mind through the imagination did not in any wise discredit it, for “an experience of poetic imagination [was] conventionally regarded as accompanied by a belief in the reality of what is imagined (Oxford English Dictionary ).

It was perhaps in Elizabethan times that the other, parallel meaning of fantasy began to take hold—a fictitious daydream, something fanciful and unreal. The word fancy was coined—derived from fantasy —to mean something that is made up whimsically in the imagination as a mere entertainment. Unfortunately, this is the misunderstanding of the nature of imagination that we have inherited in the popular mind of our century.

If we think about it even briefly, it should be clear how foolish it is to denigrate the imagination. Humans depend on the imagination’s image-making power and its image-symbols for poetic imagery, literature, painting, sculpture, and essentially all artistic, philosophical, and religious functioning. We could not develop the abstract intelligence, science, mathematics, logical reasoning, or even language, were it not for our capacity to generate these image-symbols. This is why Neumann could say what was quoted earlier:

The symbolic imagery of the unconscious is the creative source of the human spirit in all its realizations…. And because the symbol-forming process of the unconscious is the source of the human spirit, language, whose history is almost identical with the genesis and development of human consciousness, always starts out as a symbolic language. (Neumann, Great Mother , Inner Work: Seeking the Unconscious)

Active Imagination, like the unconscious, has always existed in human life. But as with many facets of our inner life, it took Jung to rediscover the lost art and make it available to modern people.

At first glance, Active Imagination may seem too simple or naive to be taken seriously as a psychological technique: It consists in going to the images that rise up in one’s imagination and making a dialogue with them. It involves an encounter with the images. The conscious ego-mind actually enters into the imagination and takes part in it. This often means a spoken conversation with the figures who present themselves, but it also involves entering into the action, the adventure or conflict that is spinning its story out in one’s imagination.

It is this awareness, this conscious participation in the imaginal event, that transforms it from mere passive fantasy to Active Imagination. The coming together of conscious mind and unconscious mind on the common ground of the imaginal plane gives us an opportunity to break down some of the barriers that separate the ego from the unconscious, to set up a genuine flow of communication between the two levels of the psyche, to resolve some of our neurotic conflicts with the unconscious, and thus to learn more about who we are as individuals.

Because of the popular notion that imagination is fictitious, many people react automatically by thinking that such an experience in the imagination would be meaningless. They think, “I would just be talking to myself.” But if we work with Active Imagination we soon confirm that we dialogue with genuine interior parts of our own selves. We confront the powerful personalities who live inside us at the unconscious level and who are so often in conflict with our conscious ideas and behavior. We actually enter into the dynamics of the unconscious: We travel into a region where the conscious mind had not known how to go.

This experience, to be sure, is symbolic. The images with whom we interact are symbols, and we encounter them on a symbolic plane of existence. But a magical principle is at work: When we experience the images, we also directly experience the inner parts of ourselves that are clothed in the images . This is the power of symbolic experience in the human psyche when it is entered into consciously: Its intensity and its effect on us is often as concrete as a physical experience would be. Its power to realign our attitudes, teach us and change us at deep levels, is much greater than that of external events that we may pass through without noticing.

When we experience the symbol, we simultaneously experience the complex, the archetype, the inner psychic entity that is represented by the symbol. When the image speaks, it is with one of our own inner voices. When we answer back, it is the unseen inner part of our own self that listens and registers. It stands before us in the form of the imaginal image.

In Active Imagination I am not so much “talking to myself” as talking to one of my selves . It is in that exchange between the ego and the various characters who rise up from the unconscious and appear in my imagination that I begin to bind the fragmented pieces of myself into a unity. I begin to know, and learn from, the parts of myself I had never known before.

When people ask me if Active Imagination is “real” or if dreams are “real,” I always think of a detail in the story of Don Quijote de la Mancha. Don Quijote said he was seeking the “bread that is made from better-than-wheat.” He meant, of course, the Host, the bread that is eaten as part of the Christian ritual. The Host is made from wheat, yet it is also fashioned from the archetype, from the body of Christ, from spirit, from better-than-wheat.

In the same figurative sense I can say that Active Imagination is “realer than real.” It is not only real in the sense that it has a practical and concrete bearing on our physical lives, it also connects us to a world of forces that are superpersonal and transcendent. It allows us to participate in shaping the flow of the principal streams of energy that join together in each of us to form the long-range patterns of our lives, our relationships, and our attitudes. It affects us on the level of realities that go deeper, and affect us more profoundly, than any local event in our daily lives.

By comparison with these huge inner forces, and the long-range contours and directions that they establish in us, the worries and decisions of daily life turn out to be mostly ripples on the surface of a huge river of life that moves slowly and inexorably toward its goal. Dream work and Active Imagination attune us to the larger vision of life, to the direction of that huge river. They pull our minds briefly off the ripples and local crosscurrents that preoccupy us most of the time.

We therefore come to sense that dream and imagination connect us to a level of existence that is not only “real” in the external sense of reality, it is more than real.