Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

by Robert A. Johnson

Jung emphasized the uniqueness of each person’s psychological structure. Thus, the name he gave this process was not an accident; it reflected his conviction that the more one faces the unconscious and makes a synthesis between its contents and what is in the conscious mind, the more one derives a sense of one’s unique individuality.

Each of us is part heroine or hero and part coward, part parent and part child, part saint and part thief. It is in learning to identify these great archetypal motifs within ourselves, learning to honor each one as a legitimate human trait, learning to live out the energy of each in a constructive way, that we make inner work a great odyssey of the spirit.

Thus we arrive at self-consciousness, a sense of ourselves as individuals who stand apart from the herd, egos who stand apart from the collective unconscious. But the price that is paid for this consciousness is a heavy one: the fragmentation, the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts within us, the feeling that the universe has fallen apart and has no central core of meaning. We are conscious enough to be torn by the conflicts of life but not yet conscious enough to sense life’s underlying unity.

First, go through your dream and write out every association that you have with each dream image. A dream may contain persons, objects, situations, colors, sounds, or speech. Each of these, for our purposes, is a distinct image and needs to be looked at in its own right. The basic technique is this: Write down the first image that appears in the dream. Then ask yourself, “What feeling do I have about this image? What words or ideas come to mind when I look at it?” Your association is any word, idea, mental picture, feeling, or memory that pops into your mind when you look at the image in the dream. It is literally anything that you spontaneously connect with the image.

One way to find the essence of a dream symbol is to go where the energy is—go to the association that brings up a surge of energy. Every symbol is calculated to rouse us, to wake us up. It is organically tied to energy systems deep in the substrata of the unconscious. When you make a connection that is very close to the energy source, sparks fly.

Every dream, in some way, either shows our effort to integrate some unconscious part of ourselves into consciousness or our resistance against the inner self, the ways we set up conflict with it rather than learn from it. This is the primary subject that our dreams are reporting on, and this is what we should look for in our dreams.

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.

This kind of Active Imagination connects us to the timeless cosmic dance of the archetypes that goes on eternally at the level of the unconscious. It is a way of discovering how those universal energy systems flow through us as individuals, how they particularize themselves and express themselves in a unique and special way within the container of our individual personalities. They seem distant and superpersonal; they seem to have nothing to do with our immediate personal lives. Yet they are the building blocks of our personalities and our life experiences. They are the elements that make us up.

Make a place (story) where the great archetypal themes can play themselves out.

But by giving this cosmic clash—of light and dark, feminine and masculine, queen and villain—a symbolic form, by bringing it up to the surface, we make it possible for the conscious ego to be aware of this huge play of forces. It can participate in the cosmic drama, play its part and have its say, and actually influence the long-range outcome. It becomes possible to consciously and voluntarily enter into the life of the archetypes that surround us, rather than sit helpless and mute, determined by powers that we can neither see nor understand.

Remember that fantasies are excellent divining rods. If a fantasy is running through the back of your mind today, you can safely assume that it is expressing, in symbolic form, one of the main dynamics, conflicts, or areas where psychic energy is concentrated in you. If you go to that fantasy and take it as a starting point for Active Imagination, you will be automatically focused on an inner subject that is immediate, relevant, and important.

When you let your feelings out and invite your inner person to do the same, it usually constellates the exchange very directly. This is because 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. And values, we find, are the mainsprings of our human lives.

Sometimes it is hard to see the difference between fully participating and trying to control. You can draw a good analogy from your dialogues with external people. When you are in a conversation with someone, courtesy and respect lead you to give the other person “equal time.” We try not to dominate the conversation; we don’t flood the other person with a stream of opinions so as to cut off his or her chance to express a viewpoint. The same rules of courtesy, restraint, and respect apply when we dialogue with the citizens of the inner world.

Often we have only experienced these parts of ourselves who now come up as images in our imagination as enemies—as carriers of slothful resistance, neurosis, unproductive vices, immaturity. That is how they look to the ego. But now, if we are going to set up an exchange in place of the habitual, lifelong war we have fought, we have to begin to listen.

If there is something in yourself that you see as a weakness, a defect, a terrible obstruction to a productive life, you nevertheless have to stop approaching that part of yourself as “the bad guy.” For once, during Active Imagination, you must try to listen to that “inferior” being as though he or she were the voice of wisdom. If our depressions or weaknesses come to us in personified form, we need to honor those characteristics as part of the total self.

It becomes the crucial task of the ego to answer back, to speak up for human values like fairness and commitment. The ego must ask, “What effect will this extreme, otherworldly doctrine have on my everyday life?” The ego must find the way to gentle and humanize these impersonal forces of the unconscious, with their overwhelming, sometimes inhuman, nature.

But other Jerichos may be more difficult. They are the ones imbedded in the very deep places of the unconscious. They are, in a sense, “life problems” that stay with us for many years and are actually necessary for our growth. They make us suffer, but they give us our maturity and our individuality in return. For these “life problems” the circling of the walls of Jericho is an exact prescription. If you personify the thing in your life that most afflicts you, make it your “Jericho,” and march around that Jericho in your Active Imagination, you will evolve your problem into a source of consciousness and growth.