Active Imagination and Dream Reentry

 

By my observation, any image that belongs to us can be worked in the cause of healing and resolution and soul growing. I have seen wonders accomplished when a dreamer has resolved to confront an initially dark and terrible image and find the gift in the nightmare. The fiercest dragons guard the richest treasures, and to earn the support of greater powers we are required to brave up. I have also seen lives saved and visits to the ER avoided by getting back inside a dream, clarifying what is going on - and applying that information to avoid manifesting an unwanted future event that may be playing in the dream. This may require courage, and significant work.
     Jung said towards the end of his life that he did not want to spend time with patients who were unwilling to do the work of active imagination. His method of active imagination and my technique of dream reentry have much in common, including the recognition that “dreams are the facts from which we must proceed” and that the raw power of images coming directly and spontaneously to the perceiver must not be shackled to theory or rules of interpretation. Stay with the image, amplify it by tracking its parallels in mythology and folklore and other dreams, go back to the image and develop it through active imagination – these are three signature features of Jung’s approach to dreams, and I encourage active dreamers to practice all of them.  Amplification requires, as Jung insisted, a “wide culture”. Active Imagination, like dream reentry, may demand courage. I think of Robert A. Johnson, the author of Inner Work, a very readable introduction to Jung’s approach. He was terrified by a lion that appeared to him in his study. He knew the lion was a vision, but it was so real he could not bear to enter his normal place of work. After many efforts to reach an understanding with the lion through active imagination, he managed a deal in which the lion would appear as a statue like the ones in front of the New York Public Library, a statue holding a book.
     Our Active Dreaming approach goes to places that Active Imagination may fail to reach. By making a dream or another personal image the portal for a shamanic journey, often powered by drumming, we enter directly into the other worlds and other times where the dream action took place (and may have continuing to unfold after our attention moved elsewhere and we returned to our bodies wherever we parked them.).
     Active dreamers are more likely than most Jungians to seek clues to the future in dreams, to look at the possibility that a dream shows a future event literally or symbolically. He knew that we intuit the future – his own visions shortly before the Great War of a bloody floodtide drowning Europe left him no doubt about that -but he seems to have rarely asked whether a dream could play out in the future in everyday life despite his interest in “primitive” cultures and his familiarity with mountain peasants, for all of whom clues to the future, from a weather forecast to a death in the family,  were one of the main things to look for in dreams.
     Jung was a doctor who guided his patients through amplification and active imagination. I am a teacher who gives dreamers a process they can do by themselves or – if sociable – do with others, using a dream as a portal for an adventure in solo or mutual lucid dreaming.

Illustration: "Drumming for Dream Reentry" by Robert Moss