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

The Audience with the Rememberer

A woman traveler describes her experiences in an extraordinary land, to the astonishment of people who know this country only from a book. They learn from her that the land of legends is real. She learns from their book what the anomalous events and conditions she has experienced may mean.

This was the 50 word report of a dream, as I recorded it on waking on the morning of March 23, 2003. The legacy of the dream was a sense of wonder, and a keen desire to know more. However, the details were flown, and I had no time to try to journey back inside the dream, because I was catching an early plane and needed to get dressed, finish packing, and rush to the airport.
     A good friend named Carol had agreed to assist me in leading a workshop, and we were booked on the same flight to Chicago, en route to places West. After we had claimed our seats and survived the automated safety briefing, I told Carol what I remembered from my dream. "What do you want to know?" she asked, following our regular dream-sharing process. "I want to know more about everything. I want to know all about the land of legends."
     Gently, Carol started a line of questioning that brought the dream alive in my mind. As I responded, I started taking frantic notes. Soon they had filled a dozen pages of my journal, and were already more than notes. They were becoming the first draft of a story. When I got to my hotel, I typed it up.
    It recounts the adventure of a young woman named Constantina. On her way to her sister's baby shower, she slips into another reality, into a strange country known to her people only through "a book compiled by an itinerant schoolmaster who was charged with sacrilege and forced to flee into exile. It is a land that is hard to describe, because it has more angles.” 
     She meets the Rememberer, a prince of the city with a forked beard, half white and half black. Their audience takes place in a pool shaped like a figure 8 or lemniscate symbol of infinity. The Rememberer is submerged below the waist. He communicates through a tablet composed of lines and waves of some electric force. It crackles like a toaster or an old bar radiator about to explode. The flashes conform to an unknown but coherent alphabet of signs. 
     When she returns home, there is a great public gathering where people ply her with questions. They ask her for her feelings about the strange man. She tells them, “I felt his indifference, the indifference of one who has seen the birth and death of suns and has outlived everything he ever loved. What I mostly noticed was his smell. It was the smell of attar of roses, cut with turmeric. And his eyes. His eyes are bottomless wells.”
     And so on, and on. When I was finished typing, I had 4,000 words, raw and strange, organized by dream logic and poetic resemblance. 

This was a quite magical experience of dream retrieval. So much can come back to us, from the other side of the wall between the worlds, when we allow it to come. The process can be greatly assisted by a caring friend who knows how to tease us to bring back more. It truly prospers when we don't interrupt ourselves by asking, Am I making this up?
    All of this came back to me when I lunched with my friend Carol and recollected in conversation how she had helped me to bring through this story. Alas, I had left my story unfinished. I had meant to go back to the draft, after that trip, and see what it wanted to become. I did go back, in a break in my travels, and developed my journal notes into something closer to a publishable story. But I could not find that version when I was choosing and polishing some of my stories for my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming. Maybe it was time to complete it. 
    I went looking for the draft and found the journal version I have excerpted here, but not the more elaborate second draft. It seemed that the second draft had never made it to my electronic data base. I did find the drawing I made, which I titled "The Audience with the Rememberer".

    Then another friend recounted a dream that, while scary, had given her the gift of a terrific scene and a marvelously wicked villain for a novel she is writing. 
    I felt an acute desire to get back to completing one of my own dream-driven stories. Yes, I could work from my journal entries with that raw first draft. But I would really like to resurrect the second draft and remember where I had taken the tale, or where the tale had taken me. Surely I had hard copy somewhere in my house.
    With some trepidation, I confronted the hundred documents boxes (no kidding) in a storeroom in my basement, many of them allowed to languish for years. Where to begin? On a whim, I pulled out a box that had unrelated materials on top. Brushing these aside, I found, in the second folder below, a typed draft of "The Rememberer". This gave me a little shiver of recognition; the shelf elves were in friendly mood.

    My second draft is the length of a novella, but (as I said) unfinished, containing many mysteries, not all of the kind that can ever be figured out by the reasoning mind. Yes, I remember: I have a significant dream-directed writing assignment to fulfill.

"Audience with the Rememberer" (c) Robert Moss