Active Imagination for Dreamwork

Active Imagination is a method developed by Carl Jung that allows the conscious mind and the unconscious mind to engage meaningfully by exploring the symbolic inner landscape of one’s psyche. Yoga Nidra is a practice that comes from ancient Hindu texts, now with a modern method to enable the conscious mind and the unconscious mind to engage meaningfully through symbolic imagery in the landscape of the mind’s eye. They are the same thing. Jung shared ”The alchemistic development of active imagination broke off after the Middle Ages but such interruptions do not occur in the East. “~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 3, Page 14. 

Sure, modern religious studies scholars would criticize Jung here for his lack of specificity and the use of the sweeping brushstroke known as “the east” or “the west”, but we understand what Jung meant in relation to his framework of language at the time, and we know he is referring to Yoga Nidra and similar practices.

The method to get into the state is a bit different, but that doesn’t impact the state. I have chosen to teach and practice Yoga Nidra as active imagination in terms of how I see it as a tool for individuation and in terms of how Jung informed most of my work is. I’ll quickly mention, that you might hear the English phrase that someone has an active imagination, often teachers describing their students, or as a way to tell someone they are being paranoid, but that is not what we are talking about here, that is just an everyday English phrase. 

Active Imagination with capital letters is mostly associated today with dreamwork, Jungian analysts may suggest using Active Imagination when an analysand brings an important dream to a session and more information is needed from the unconscious to understand the dream.

Jung himself used Active Imagination, and in effect, Yoga Nidra, to explore the depths of his unconscious, the details of which are described in The Red Book. I won’t go into any detail here about this now, one because it is not relevant to the way in which we will be utilising Active Imagination for Dreamwork, and two because it is such a specific aspect of Jung’s work and is much more esoteric in the true sense of the word. 

But that is not something that you will accidentally do, especially if you are following my guided Yoga Nidras which will be focusing on interrupted dreams or dream interpretation. 

You may be asking yourself at this point, if Active Imagination is pretty much the same thing as Yoga Nidra, why are you doing a Yoga Nidra podcast episode on Active Imagination for Dreamwork and not just Yoga Nidra for Dreamwork?

If anyone has any concerns around working with dreams, perhaps a fear of nightmarish scenarios or being swallowed up by the unconscious, I will take some time now to address those fears. Both Active Imagination (and Yoga Nidra) is a sober practice, you are not under the spell of a psychedelic drug, unlike dreams where you are almost entirely in the unconscious and have little to no control, you are awake and aware and fully capable of simply opening your eyes if you want to stop. Even in dreams we do that. It is likely that the interrupted dream that you would like to return to was because you had a visitor from Porlock but it is also likely that you woke yourself up because the content of the dream was terrifying to your ego. 

Either way, I’ll explain a little bit about how Jungians approach dreams and I hope that it provides you with both comfort and courage. 

Generally speaking, dreams are subjective or objective. Subjective dreams means that all players in the dream represent different parts of your psyche, perhaps the Animus or the Shadow, and the people that are representing them have qualities that your unconscious mind is drawing from to represent these parts of you. An common example is a terrifying figure is trying to break into your home. This invasion is so fear inducing that you wake up. Jungians are likely to say that this terrifying figure could be your shadow or an instinctive function that you have cut off or that you won’t allow in because your ego has decided it is dangerous.
An objective dream is where the players in the dream generally represent themselves and your unconscious mind is working through the external relationships that you have, revealing perhaps patterns or feelings that your conscious mind is not paying attention to or is still digesting.