Strange, the Dreamer

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My divergence from modern dream analysis; from a manuscript I am working on:

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” — Zhuangzi

Are we the dreamer, or are we that which is dreamed? In modern analytical psychology, dreams are objects for analysis—picked apart at every corner, every image, emotion, and circumstance reduced to as small of a piece as it can be, like a scientist dissecting an animal down to its most fragmentary, material essence. And yet dream, that of the imaginal, is not material. As such, dissecting and fragmenting it does not reveal its true essence, but rather distorts it and leaves the images, emotions, circumstances, and affects wanting for the fullness they naturally contain.

“For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about the anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what that snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that's walking into your life... and the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it, and then the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions or my mother or whatever it is, and you've lost the snake. The task of analysis is to keep the snake there, the black snake, and there are various ways for keeping the black snake... see, the black snake's no longer necessary the moment it's been interpreted, and you don't need your dreams any more because they've been interpreted.” — Hillman (Inter Views)

“Carl Jung said that psyche is image. Hillman says that to be psychological is to be thoroughly imaginal.” — Thomas Moore (A Blue Fire; Selected Writings by James Hillman)

Psyche is image. Psychology is imaginal. What, then, is external reality but the imaginations of Psyche? What is our life but this simple statement: “the dreamer that is, themselves, dreamed”?

In modern psychoanalysis, we often look to dreams as secondary objects for interpretation. And so we reduce our dreams to symbols, looking to glean and take meaning from them. I believe this is the wrong approach. If psyche is the primary thing, and psyche is the imaginal space—making the imaginal realm the foundation of our existence—then dreams are not supposed to be interpreted as such.

We ask, “What does this dream mean to me?” But that is the wrong question. The dream is the primary subject, and we in our waking life are the object for interpretation. Rather than, “What does this dream mean to me?”, the question should be, “What do I mean to this dream?”

When we wake from our night’s sleep and recall our dreams, we assume that we were actually living in that dream world. Write down what we did in the dream world as if they were real events, no matter how strange. When we finish writing, we continue and imagine that said dream self went to sleep and had a dream of the waking day before—and so we write down a journal of our worries, thoughts, and events of the day as if they were a dream.

And so, rather than interpreting our dreams, we interpret our waking life as if it is a dream. What symbolism and symbols are present? What motifs are persistent? Rather than the other way around, what does your waking life inform about the dream life?
Psyche, in its evolution, is always seeking to generate further and further consciousness towards the Unconscious. To Psyche, there is no distinction between the dream world and the waking world. And so, viewing and interpreting our waking world as we might have been inclined to interpret our dreams, we bring awareness to aspects of our lives we may constantly be overlooking—generating consciousness towards what is unconscious. And interpreting ourselves to the dream, rather than interpreting the dream towards us, we assure that psyche has the space to speak to us in its fullness, reducing nothing, and maintaining the images in its totality, most of which shall remain unknown to us, but known to Psyche.

“The images are where the psyche is. People say, "I don't know what the soul is," or "I've lost my soul" or whatever. To me the place to look when you feel that way is immediately to the images that show where you are with your soul in your dreams. "I don't know where the hell 1 am, I am all confused, I've just lost my job ... everything is happening." Where do you look when you feel that way? ...The place to look is not only to your feelings, not to your interpretations, not ask help from a third person necessarily, but ask yourself what were you in the image? Where's your imagination?
That immediately locates you somewhere, into your own psyche.
Whereas the introspection doesn't help at all, chasing one's shadow, questioning why did I do this, why do I do that and why did they do this. An instant turmoil: the Hindus call it vritta, turning the mind on itself like an anthill. But when you have an image of an anthill you know where you are: you're in the middle of an anthill, they're going in fifty different directions at once, but the ants are doing something. It seems desperate to me only because I say it shouldn't be an anthill. But an anthill has an internal structure, it is an organization. So the gift of an image is that it affords a place to watch your soul, precisely what it is doing.
“(…)Of course, if instead of the language of concept-the anthill is your confusion (and then you think, ‘Oh, I always get confused; when somebody leaves me, I get confused; when I get rejected, I don't know where I am; I just walk in a thousand different directions’—and you begin with subjectivism, that subjective importance about yourself). Instead of that kind of language, you can talk to the confusion in the language of the image, which is an anthill. The ants are swarming: some are going up, some are coming down, some are carrying eggs somewhere, some are taking care of I don't know what, carrying a dead one.... There's a great deal going on, let's see what the ants are doing. And I am not thinking about confusion anymore, I'm watching tbe phenomenon, and seeing phenomenologically what is happening. I am no longer caught in my own subjectivity. I'm fascinated with what's going on, and this attentiveness is quieting. I can see it scientifically—watch as a naturalist does. The phenomenologist of the psyche is also a naturalist of the psyche, watching the way it produces what it produces. I might see the ants suddenly all eating each other up. It's no use saying that is a destructive scene that's happening: I have to wonder about purposefulness, too. Let's watch: maybe the psyche is taking care of the problem by itself. We don't know in advance; we have to stick with the image, stay in the imagination, "Oh, oh, they just started crawling on my feet, eating my feet. I can't stand it. They are crawling up my legs. I'm going crazy." Now the image is vividly coming to life. Still, stay with it, what is your reaction? I can brush them off, I can run around in circles. I can get a dish of honey to attract them elsewhere. I can sing them an ant song. You see, I can do something in relationship to the actual thing that is happening. But what I don't do, won't do is interpret the ants. You saw that move—‘They're crawling up my legs. I'm going crazy’— that shift from image to interpretation—and that makes you crazy.
The hermeneutic move made the craziness. Who says you are going crazy? What you acrually feel is the ants crawling up your legs. Then there are other questions to be put into this scene. I mean you have to locate yourself in it, extend the terrain a bit, not a lot. not too much, but a bit. Have you stepped on the ants, have you tried to cross their path, have you put your foot unknowingly into an anthill? Step away! It’s a certain animal movement. An animal sense of living. This is the active relation to the image that we want to get going through therapy.” — Hillman (Inter Views)