Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

by Robert A. Johnson

Our tendency in the West is to make everything abstract, to use wordy discussion as a substitute for direct feeling experience. We have a tremendous need to get our bodies and our feelings involved. We have to transform our theoretical ideas into “gut-level” experience. Ideas and images from your dream should enter into your emotions, your muscle fibers, the cells of your body. It takes a physical act. When it registers physically, it also registers at the deepest levels of the psyche.

All my experience as a psychologist leads me to the conclusion that a sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it generally indicates an ego inflation that cuts the conscious personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious. It is ironic, then, that so much of our modern culture is aimed at eradicating all reverence, all respect for the high truths and qualities that inspire a feeling of awe and worship in the human soul.

the ritual protects the fragile ego consciousness of individual and tribe from the raw power of the unconscious. When ancient and primitive cultures spoke of “going to the gods” in their rituals, it meant in their archaic language that they approached the great and terrible archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Dreams are said to have four stages of development, all of which must be present to make a complete dream: Dramatis personae (persons and places) Statement of the problem Response to the problem within the dream (development) Lysis (i.e., outcome, or resolution)

The essence of Active Imagination is your conscious participation in the imaginative experience. This kind of imagination is active because the ego actually goes into the inner world, walks and talks, confronts and argues, makes friends with or fights with the persons it finds there. You consciously take part in the drama in your imagination. You engage the other actors in conversation, exchange viewpoints, go through adventures together, and eventually learn something from each other.

Any quality within you can be personified in this way and persuaded to clothe itself in an image so that you can interact with it. If you feel an inflation, you can go to your imagination and ask that inflation to personify itself through an image. If you vaguely feel a mood controlling you, you can do the same. It is the image that gives one a starting point. You can then enter into dialogue; you can interact; and you can move toward some kind of understanding.

Invite the unconscious Dialogue and experience Add the ethical element of values. Make it concrete with physical ritual

We have already talked about the importance of writing your inner work. This is even more true of Active Imagination. Your inner dialogue should be written or typed. This is your major protection against turning it into just another passive fantasy. The writing helps you to focus on what you are doing, and not wander off into random daydreams. It enables you to record what is said and done so that you will remember and digest the experience afterwards.

You have to be assertive enough to set aside a room and a block of time for yourself. Tell everyone in the house that you are not to be disturbed except for a nuclear blast or the Second Coming. You are entitled to that kind of freedom, privacy, and security. You need it in order to make your journey into the inner world.

It has to be clear that only you will ever read these pages; otherwise it will be very difficult to be honest in what you record.

In the midpoint of this journey that is our life I found myself passing through a dark forest, The right path through which had disappeared. And what a hard thing it is to speak of that savage forest… —Dante, Divine Comedy

Jung said that it is exactly where you feel most frightened and most in pain that your greatest opportunity lies for personal growth.

If a dream is not resolved, or you keep getting the same dream over and over again, you can extend the dream out through imagination and bring it to a resolution. This is a legitimate use of imagination, since the dream and the imagination come from the same source in the unconscious.

So when you find yourself wanting to do Active Imagination but can’t seem to get started or find a starting point, go to a recent dream. Not only will it help you to get the Active Imagination flowing, it will transform your relationship to your dream and your relationship to the inner person, because you will be adding your conscious participation to the dream.

One must be willing to say: “Who are you? What do you have to say? I will listen to you. You may have the floor for this entire hour if you want; you may use any language you want. I am here to listen.”

Remember Jung’s observation: He said that the ego’s relationship to the huge unconscious is like that of a tiny cork floating in the ocean. We often feel like that. We feel like a cork that is being tossed about in the ocean of life, completely at the mercy of the waves and storms that push and pull us. We seem to have little control or power over anything. Jung continued his analogy with a startling thing: The cork is nevertheless morally equal to the ocean, because it has the power of consciousness! Although the ego is small, it has this peculiar power of awareness that we call consciousness, and that special, concentrated power gives it a position that is as necessary, as strong, and as valuable as the seemingly infinite richness of the unconscious. The little cork can talk back to the ocean, and has a viewpoint to contribute, one without which the evolution of consciousness cannot proceed. The ego can talk back, and this makes the dialogue one between equals. The ego’s capacity for consciousness gives it the power, the right, and even the duty to wrestle with the great unconscious on equal terms and to work out a synthesis of values.

Jung took the audacious point of view that humanity holds a specific role in creation: to contribute the act of consciousness and the point of view of morality, in its highest sense. We are surrounded by a universe that is awesome and beautiful, but its forces behave in a way that is amoral. They are not concerned, as we are, with the specifically human values of justice, fairness, protection of the defenseless, service to our fellow humans, the keeping intact of the fabric of practical life. It is we who have to introduce these values into the world around us. And since the creatures who arise in our Active Imagination are often, for all practical purposes, personifications of the impersonal forces of nature, it is we who must bring the ethical, humane, and practical elements into Active Imagination.

The archetypes burst into consciousness with all the pent-up instinctual power of the primordial jungle, and like wild animals in nature, they can have little concern with human ideas of fairness, justice, or morality. They serve a realm that is close to the instincts: They are concerned that nature be served, that evolution take place, that all the archetypal themes be incarnated into human life. But how that takes place, how much damage it might do, and what other values might be trampled on in the process—with these things, the raw, primitive archetypes do not know how to be concerned.

The critical task that each of us has, therefore, when we “take the lid off” of the unconscious, is to think independently and clearly. We must listen carefully to hear the truth that is hidden behind the overblown, seductive, dramatic urgings of the inner voices. You must refine that truth to something that is more civilized, more human, more bearable—something that can be integrated into ordinary human life without incinerating it. And, toward that truth, you must find your own individual ethical stance.

That is the way it is with true Active Imagination. When you come into contact with a real part of yourself, you feel it as a threat, a menace. Your knees knock. You sweat and tremble. But you are safe, because you do all this within the controlled laboratory of Active Imagination. You can risk what you otherwise would not dare, confront the things that would otherwise be deadly.