WORK WITH DREAMS

The classical Jungian attitude toward the dream is expressed very well by a term I would borrow from
existential analysis …. This term is: to befriend the dream. To participate in it, to enter into its imagery
and mood, to want to know more about it, to understand, play with, live with, carry, and become
familiar with—as one would do with a friend. As I grow familiar with my dreams I grow familiar with my
inner world. Who lives in me? What inscapes are mine? What is recurrent and therefore what keeps
coming back to reside in me? These are the animals and people, places and concerns, that want me to
pay attention to them, to become friendly and familiar with them. They want to be known as a friend
would. They want to be cared for and cared about. This familiarity after some time produces in one a
sense of at-homeness and at-oneness with an inner family which is nothing else than kinship and
community with oneself, a deep level of what can also be called the blood soul. In other words, the inner
connection to the unconscious again leads to a sense of soul, an experience of an inner life, a place
where meanings home….

Friendship wants to keep the connection open and flowing. The first thing, then, in this noninterpretive
approach to the dream is that we give time and patience to it, jumping to no conclusions, fixing it in no
solutions. Befriending the dream begins with a plain attempt to listen to the dream, to set down on
paper or in a dream diary in its own words just what it says. One takes especial note of the feeling tone
of the dream, the mood upon waking, the emotional reactions of the dreamer in the dream, the delight
or fear or surprise. Befriending is the feeling approach to the dream, and so one takes care receiving the
dream's feelings, as with a living person with whom we begin a relationship. (Insearch, 57–60)

An imaginal ego is at home in the dark, moving among images as one of them. Often there are inklings
of this ego in those dreams where we are quite comfortable with absurdities and horrors that would
shock the daylight out of waking consciousness. The imaginal ego realizes that the images are not his
own and that even his ego-body and ego-feeling and ego-action in a dream belong to the dream image.
So the first move in teaching ego how to dream is to teach it about itself, that it too is an image.

An imaginal ego is further built by voiding its old ground, the attitudes mentioned above—moralism,
personalism, naturalism, literalism—deriving from the corporal perspective. The old heroic ego loses its
stuffing and returns to a two-dimensional shade. Then it is able to reflect its deeds metaphorically. Then
it may realize that the ego in the dream is also a wholly subjective figure, or shade, who is now voided of
the I who lay himself down to sleep. Ego-behavior in the dream reflects the pattern of the image and the
relations within the image, rather than the patterns and relations of the dayworld.

Admittedly, the dream-ego and the waking-ego have a special “twin” relationship; they are shadows of
each other, as Hades is the brother of Zeus. But the I in the dream is no secret stage director
(Schopenhauer) who wrote the play he acts in, no self-portrait photographer taking his own snapshot
from below, nor are the wants fulfilled in a dream the ego's wishes. The dream is not “mine,” but the
psyche's, and the dream-ego merely plays one of the roles in the theater, subjected to what the
“others” want, subject to the necessities staged by the dream.

The work on dreams follows the work of dreams. We work on the dream, not to unravel it as Freud said,
to undo the dream work's undoing, but to respond to its work with the likeness of our work, all the
while aiming to speak like the dream, imagine like the dream. Work on dreams does not forego analysis,
but the analysis is in service of another archetypal principle and carried out in another attitude than the
usual one. Analysis of course means making separations and differentiations. A dream is pulled apart,
even violated, and this is indeed the necessary destructive work of intellect and of discriminating feeling.
But now, the archetype served by a dream analysis is not only making conscious where consciousness
means sunlight; we may place this destructive analytical work now in connection with Hades, who would
take the life out of all our natural assumptions, all our futuristic previews, or with the bricoleur and his
hermetic sleight of hand that steals what we want to hold fast.

Analytical tearing apart is one thing, and conceptual interpretation another. We can have analysis
without interpretation. Interpretation turns the dream into its meaning. Dream is replaced with
translation. But dissection cuts into the flesh and bone of the image, examining the tissue of its internal
connections, and moves around among its bits, though the body of the dream is still on the table. We
haven't asked what does it mean, but who and what and how it is.

We may also understand our resistance to dreaming as a resistance in our “natural” nature to Hades.
We “can't remember,” go vague, forget to jot it down, or scribble it beyond deciphering, and excuse
ourselves by pointing to the obvious slipperiness of dreams. Yet if each dream is a step into the
underworld, then remembering a dream is a recollection of death and opens a frightening crevice under
our feet. The other alternative—loving one's dreams, not being able to wait for the next one, such as we
find in enthusiastic puer psychology, shows to what extent this archetype is in love with easeful death
and blind to what is below.

Again, a duplicity. This time the experience is fear and desire. Like Persephone, we are both repelled and
attracted, sometimes seizing only half the experience, struggling like her against being carried down by
the dream, other times in its embrace and ruling from its throne. Beyond Hades as destroyer and lover,
however, there is Hades of incomparable intelligence. Work with dreams is to get at this hidden
intelligence, to communicate with the god in the dream. Because the dream is both black and white, its
intelligence is neither altogether obscure nor altogether clear. …

Because of this individuality of the dream, conceptual generalities about dreams must fail. As Heraclitus
(frg. 113, Freeman) said: “The thinking faculty is common to all,” but (frg. 115, Freeman), “The soul has
its own logos, which grows according to its needs.” By digesting and transforming the day's remainders,
according to the logos (intelligence) of the soul rather than to the laws of common thought, the dream
work makes an individualized soul. This cannot be made only in the day world where, as Heraclitus says:
“One day is like any other.” The deformative, transformative work in dreams constructs the house of
Hades, one's individual death. Each dream builds upon that house. Each dream is practice in entering
the underworld, a preparation of the psyche for death.