Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

by Robert A. Johnson

The unconscious is an enormous field of energy, much larger than the conscious mind. Jung compared the ego—the conscious mind—to a cork bobbing in the enormous ocean of the unconscious.

You need to be particularly careful with Active Imagination. It should not be practiced unless you have someone available who is familiar with this art, someone who knows how to get you back to the ordinary earth if you should be overwhelmed by the inner world.

“An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.” (Neumann, Great Mother, Inner Work: Seeking the Unconscious)

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.”

Conflating opinion with imaging. Opinion is terminal, a schematic response and largely habitual whereas imaging is active and the direct internal analog of playing. One learns nothing new from one's opinions whereas is fraught with potential. Of the two, imaging is the closer approximation to "reality".

In Active Imagination I am not so much “talking to myself” as talking to one of my selves.

Aka an IFS part

Because inner work is a dialogue between conscious and unconscious elements, it always raises the specter of conflict—inner conflict over values, urges, beliefs, ways of life, morals, loyalties.

The conflicts, of course, are there in any case, regardless of whether we face up to them. But our dream work forces us to look at them.

And Active Imagination, perhaps more than any other form of inner work, brings the conflicts to the surface...

The most important aspect of the androgynous psyche is the soul-image. In every man and woman there is an inner being whose primary function in the psyche is to serve as the psychopomp—the one who guides the ego to the inner world, who serves as mediator between the unconscious and the ego.

Adam in midrashic tales was androgynous or more accurately a chimera of both man and woman. Convention separates and in the IFS sense, we collectively blend with the apparent external separation of man and woman. In reality humans as a species cannot exist without both simultaneously and in intimate connection.

The whole basis of the romantic fantasy that so often sabotages ordinary human love is the projection of a man’s anima onto a woman or a woman’s animus onto an external man. In this way people try to complete themselves through another human being, try to live out the unconscious, unrealized parts of themselves through the external person on whom they put the romantic projection.

Because we often repress the best parts of ourselves and think of them as “negative” qualities, some of the richest parts of the self—even the voice of God itself—can only partake in our lives by “stealing” our time, stealing our energy through compulsions and neurosis, and slipping into our lives in the unprotected places where our guard is down:

Curiously, people usually resist their good qualities even more emphatically than they resist facing their negative qualities. There may be a character in your dream who behaves in a noble and courageous way. Since that inner person is part of you, its qualities are also yours. So long as you are facing your negative and immature traits squarely, you also have a duty to acknowledge the fine qualities in yourself, and to live them consciously.

It is a mistake to jump to conclusions and to call your inner person anima or shadow or one of these terms if you are not really sure.

Nominalizing is the bane of materialistic civilization. We jump to name, to label which gives us a category and expectation to get quickly to the less costly system 1 type thinking and it may be left as a more amorphous and unarticulated opinion or belief.

For every dream-person who fits clearly within one of the archetypes, there are many others who don’t: They are just persons in your dream. In that case, don’t force them into a mold. Let them be who they are.

public thoroughfare. It is not my own space; it belongs to “them,” out there.

Boundaries and the proper cultivating of such. Also the Jewish dictum about Anavah (poorly translated as "humility") "no more than my place, no less than my space.

If dreams only served to affirm our pre-existing opinions and assumptions, they would not contribute to our psychological growth at all.

Dreams as the unconscious imagining actively (as distinct from active imagination) as such they are not terminal schemata though one might be tempted to dismiss them by reducing them to opinion or belief.

Dreams are aimed at the unfinished business of your life, showing what you need to face next, what you need to learn next.

Sometimes, yes. They can also be fractal resonance of network patterns both of one’s conscious/unconscious and one's lived reality and the greater reality of which one is part.

People are usually surprised to learn that the most powerful rituals are the small ones, the subtle ones.

This is how habit is formed and how type 2 thinking becomes type 1 thinking. It's also the reality of being embodied.

One of the meanings of the word ceremony, in its original Latin form, was “awe.”

Middah of yirah

correct ritual is symbolic behavior, consciously performed

Embodying the symbolic behavior of which logos and language are some of the modalities.

“Why is it that when people begin to relinquish the world, the first thing they relinquish is common sense?” You may feel as you confront the new and magical world of dreams that you are giving up your old, narrow world. But don’t give up on common sense. Don’t give up on courtesy or respect toward the people around you.

There is no Torah (narrative) without derek eretz (correct behavior and common sense) and no derek eretz without Torah.

The fourth step of dream work does not consist in dramatically confronting people you are angry with, breaking up relationships, or doing destructive things. It does not consist of trying to “straighten things out” with a lot of talk. That leads nowhere. It should be a physical ritual that affirms your own personal responsibility for your dream and for the issue it portrays.

A.c.t

In Jung’s model, the feeling function is not connected with emotions, as some people assume. Feelings and emotions are distinct energy systems in the psyche. When people feel, they are actually assigning value. If you feel love toward another person, you are assigning the highest value to that person, affirming that person’s worth, value. When you feel that something is beautiful, you are again assigning a value or recognizing a value in that thing. Therefore the feeling function could better be called the valuing function.

Feelings last about 40 seconds neurologically, emotions are resonant from those brief experiences and through ruminating can become prolonged.

Our hoodlum feelings also steal energy

Akin to IFS firefighters who trigger to protect other parts

Now, what does this mean to me, in practice, in the way I live my life? I can take courage and start devoting myself consciously, deliberately, to the feeling world. I can devote a large portion of my time and energy to cultivating my friendships, my relationships with people. I can devote time to the activities and subjects that have quality and depth and profound meaning for me. Most important, I can do this without feeling guilty, without feeling that I am giving in to some “hoodlum” side of myself, entertaining myself with the warm companionship of human beings when I ought to be doing something “useful.”

Before starting Active Imagination be sure that there is someone available for you to go to or call in case you become overwhelmed by the imagination and can’t cut it off.

Worry is one form of passive fantasy.

Ruminating on past feelings projected into future situations which is likely an unconscious us of active imagination but with little or no volition

The real question is not the authenticity of the images, but rather, What do I do with them?

Each of us has all the great archetypal themes hidden inside. We all have the seeds of the heroic quest within us; we must live it out sometime, on some level. Each of us has the journey and labors of Psyche, the encounter with Eros and Aphrodite, built somewhere into our inner structure. One can’t avoid these archetypal leitmotivs; one must express and experience them.

Unlike dream work, where it is so important to analyze and draw meanings from the symbols, it can be counterproductive in Active Imagination if you distract yourself by thinking too much about what the symbols may mean in psychological terms.

A few people work through their Active Imagination in special modes. They may express their inner imagery through dance, by playing music, drawing, painting, sculpting, or speaking the dialogue out loud.

Culturally influenced as civilization is currently a largely (voyeuristic) auditory and visual generator whereas we all have many expressive modalities (perhaps culturally "exiled" in the IFS sense which also tends to blending with the auditory and visual rather than experiencing them)

invitation by personifying the obsessive feelings.

feelings are mostly concerned with values: who or what we love and appreciate, what we are afraid of, what we feel is dishonest or illegitimate, what we desire for ourselves and others.

A.c.t

In order to do a true act of imagination, it is necessary to stick with the image that we start with, stay with the situation until there is some kind of resolution.

The most important aspect of this is to be present in your feelings and participate with your feelings. One must sense that it is real, that it is actually happening

If one is not really participating with the feeling side, it is not true Active Imagination.

Ah, but different modalities may have been exiled to the point of disassociating them leading to various levels of numbing. Feeling may be difficult, unfamiliar, alarming, triggering, and overwhelming.

Active Imagination is, more than anything, a process of listening.

There are more modalities than listening

Not all dialogue or interaction with your inner persons will be through words.

There is a tendency to take everything the inner figures say as final authority. This would be just as foolish and one-sided as our previous ego-centered approach.

Transference of the ego onto another part

NOT MANIPULATING

The purpose of Active Imagination is not to “program” the unconscious, but to listen to the unconscious. And, if you do listen, the unconscious, in turn, will listen to you.

Jung also observed that there is no development of consciousness, in the human sense, without ethical conflict.

what happens when you allow yourself to go off on an inflation, be possessed by an archetype, and lose the independent position of your ego.

Blending in the IFS sense

ethical element by holding out for the attitudes and conduct that are consistent with your character and your deepest values.

A.c.t

ethical balance requires that we not let one archetype or one part of ourselves take over at the expense of the others. We can’t sacrifice essential values in order to pursue one narrow urge or goal.

nurture and preserve the specifically human values that serve human life, that keep practical daily life going, and that ...

do not want to pursue some idealized goals to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.”

general principle that whenever you do any form of inner work and bring it to an insight or resolution, you should do something to make it concrete. Either do a physical ritual or, if appropriate, do something that will integrate it into the fabric of your practical daily life.

You must not act out. In psychological jargon, acting out means, basically, taking our inner, subjective conflicts and urges and trying to live them out externally and physically.

You must not take this fourth step of Active Imagination as license to act out your fantasies in their raw, literal form.