Psyche needs dreams (images) and dreams need psyche (soul)
Dreaming-As-Mystery
Paradoxically in Embodied Imagination our basic framework for understanding a dream is by intentionally ‘not understanding’ a dream. This open, non-interpretive approach is foundational to the ethos of Embodied Imagination. In order to achieve this not-understanding perspective we follow the anxiety-inducing attitude known as negative capability. A concept articulated by John Keats advocating “being in uncertainties, mysteries, (and) doubts without any irritating reaching after fact or reason”.
Having no idea what a dream means (by staying in the mystery) requires that we do not jump to conclusions, reducing the dream images into psychological concepts of symbols. Since the more ignorant of what a dream means we remain, Bosnak concludes, the more profound the results of our dreamwork will be.
Being in mysteries is important in Embodied Imagination because dreams don’t belong to us, per se, rather, according to Bosnak “images are the embodiments of their own intelligence”. This ambiguity and mystery of the imagination is yet further expounded as Bosnak writes, "intelligence, is not limited only to our mind, but exists around us!” In fact he insists, “we are surrounded by intelligences” possessing “a mind of their own”.
The way we apply negative capability to dreams comprises a twofold process; firstly by adhering to the quintessential Hillmanian maxim: “stick to the image”. Central to Archetypal Psychology; ‘stick to the image’ in many ways similar to negative capability, means not to venture beyond or out of the dream environment. Therefore by staying with the dream we honour the independence of the images including their given emotion, mood and sensations.
Incidentally, even before Hillman, Jung stressed the importance of “stick(ing) as close as possible to the dream images” in order to “understand the dream’s meaning”. Stressing the independence of dreams Jung realised that dreams posses “their” own criterion, which professes “their” own meaning irrespective of the dreaming ego. Therefore meaning for Jung could only come to light by “keep(ing) as close to the dream and its individual form” as possible.
The second and simultaneous meeting of the dream, still submitting to the mystery, is focusing on the experience or assuming a phenomenological orientation towards the image. Providing further validation of the autonomy of the image, phenomenology focuses on the hermeneutics of experience, “indicating” as Jung said the, “vital realities” of human existence. Realising that the psyche worked in strange and ambiguous ways, Jung deduced that by staying with the experience of the event, eventually psychic growth and adaptation towards a higher level of consciousness would reveal it self.
Therefore phenomenology, by avoiding a myriad of reductionisms especially the ever narrowing confines of intellectual understanding, aligns with the soulful and poetic nature of the psyche. For it is in the experience that we find soul as we oscillate between the revealed and the concealed.
However…
Dreaming-As-Counterbalance
Jung as well as Freud understood that very often a dream does arise from or comment on a certain complex at play in the psyche of the dreamer. For Jung this owed to his observation that complexes are “tender spots of the psyche” which seem to have the tendency to “react most quickly to problematic external situation(s)”. This reaction would, in Jung’s observation, often reflect in dreams by inversely mirroring the disposition of the ego. Providing thereby, as Jung saw it, compensation as a counterbalance for ego fixations.
In the Freudian school dreams are seen as nocturnal manifestations revealing inhibited impulses a.k.a repressed psychic content. These images of repression is mirrored back to the ego in a very subtle way as unconscious wish fulfilments with the purpose of maintaining psychic equilibrium.
In both these frameworks we find that the dream mirrors content that habitual consciousness has either repressed, suppressed or is not yet conscious of.
In other words a dream is autonomous and independent and yet seems to be intimately related to the psyche of the dreamer?!
Dreaming-As-Mirror-Of-The-Heart
To understand this point (which is the point of this article) we now turn to the islamic scholar Henry Corbin. Corbin’s studies of mystical Islam reveals that “Imaginative Forms (dream images) belong precisely to what is secretly contained in the heart”. Imaginative consciousness (God Her/Him the Self according to Mulla Sadra Shirdzi) as the divine or angelic creator of dreams, Corbin continues, is like a mirror manifesting the form of the thing placed in front of it. Therefore the context of our dreams arise as a mirroring of our heart.
If we remember that in ancient Egypt consciousness was placed in the heart, this Sufi idea acts like a bridge between middle eastern mysticism and modern psychology. It also justifies the premise of this article; if the heart and soul is made manifest in our dreams then an understanding of soul through the science of psyche seems acutely important.
Dreaming-As-Me
In a very fundamental way dreams are reflections of psyche, perhaps more than reflections, perhaps they are us in ways we aren’t aware of yet! On this note, Bosnak writes that “the dreaming genius is mine, in the same way that the world is mine. My world, he says, my dream, my creative dreaming genius. It's all one! Dream, creative genius and I form a single indistinguishable pattern in the tapestry of psyche.
Venturing a bit further east in the Tao Te Ching we discover that “being and non being engender each other”. From this Taoist perspective, in the idea of hsiang sheng, or mutual arising, we find that nothing comes into being in isolation. Like yin and yang the physical and the imaginal (mind and matter if you will) arise simultaneously.
Applied to this article we can therefore say that the dream and the ego are two different aspects of the same phenomena. In other words, concrete reality and imagination arise mutually as two planes of the same unity - soul.
From this brief discussion I hope its clear that one cannot hear a dream without also hearing the dreamer. Both are implicated in the totality of the psyche. Asking for associations isn’t enough. Like Jung showed, they might indicate an active complex, but then, as he advises, we have to let go of all understanding and meet the images as autonomous and independent figures in the ontologically real world of imagination.
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