Active Imagination

Do you?

Not too long I started therapy . My therapist is a medical doctor. I consulted her initially because I have high cortisol levels and don’t absorb progesterone well.

After the removal of some evil polyps last year, I decided to to try to go further into the problem, not by using medication, which invariably leads to more medication, but by investigating inner blockages. I had a problematic adoption, and I carry the trauma in my body, as we all do, because psychological damage has a way of raising a somatic response. Maybe to get noticed. Often, physical damage is the only way we do notice deep harm.

I have known about my cortisol levels for a long time. I exercise most days and eat the right balance of foods. I get enough sleep. And so on. I take extra progesterone and use a good clinic to keep an eye on my hormone levels. But finally I decided to go deeper. I can live with my situation but I don’t want to anymore.

The doctor surprised me by suggesting that we use active imagination. I surprised myself by finding I could easily enter into that other state. But, I suppose, it’s what I am doing when I am writing fiction. I have to enter an altered state. Otherwise, it’s just me and my head-torch, and no matter how smart you are, that is not enough.

Lately, we visit my dreams. Then I am invited to go back into the dream and question any characters who might be there, or explore the landscape. I am asked how I feel as these stages unfold. Of course, there are resistances. There are also patterns emerging. I like working with the dreams now, because doing so switches off my rational responses. I can’t talk my way out. Afterwards I am tired. Last week I cried.

This week, she’s gone to Scotland, hooray.

I do not believe that our rational self is our entire self. I do believe there is an unconscious layer that is not only instinct, or automatic pilot, or lost memories. I find this unconscious layer responds better to images. Last week I wrote about words as the part of silence that can be spoken. I have always needed to be in the silence, and tried to make it possible in the way I live, so that I am not in an endless, meaningless jabber. My own as much as anyone else’s. But I am a rational, problem-solving, practical person who uses language to make sense of the world. Fine. But not fine when what I am trying to coax out are states of being that are not using language at all.

What am I trying to coax out?

No idea. There’s a shape far out at sea. Nothing is clear.

I will know it when I find it. This inner work isn’t a destination and it isn’t a journey. I am not on a Quest. Yet, the Buried Treasure is really there. Or the Princess. Or the Pearl of Great Price or the Lamp, or any of the symbols of totality that exist everywhere in fairytales. But I am not Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker, and while there is certainly something in me that needs righting, I can make no demands, can find no map, only the torn-out pages of the dreams.

You know how in fairytales there’s always an old King, and we know that’s a symbol of the Self that is too weak or too tired to hold things together anymore. The firm grip falters. So there’s a force of evil, a dragon or an ogre, or whatever, menacing the Princess or the village, and then there is a Hero-type, who is really just a version of new life. A new attitude coming in. A fresh approach. I think our well-made worlds do get worn-out. We look around, what’s it all for, why are we still doing this, and so on? You can have an affair, or another baby, or move house, but if there’s a deep and nagging unease, then that’s not selfishness or stupidity; it’s a wish to reconnect with the vitality of life that is nothing to do with age. The vitality of life is not rushing about doing it all. People confuse busyness with vitality. Activity with energy. As we get older and we can’t use our bodies to convince us that we are FINE, we have a chance to wonder if vitality and energy might now be pointing inwards, not outwards.

It’s true that such challenges can’t happen when people are reduced to wretchedness and poverty. All you can do is try to get through the day. But what a lethal mess we have made of this world that by the 21st century we can’t have the creative time to work on deeper challenges. Who would we be, as a people, if war, corruption, destruction, scarcity, crime, inequality, race-hate, the worship of money and power, were not our dominant dark ‘values’?

Going to the moon or mars is just another way of outsourcing our discontent. What is here and now? What needs to be done? in the world, yes, always. And in our inner worlds, where growth and awareness are trivialised as luxuries. If our inner worlds were in Tao, then our outer world would not look like this.

So, because I must, because I have no choice, because I am aware of a knocking on the other side of the wall, I have to do what I am doing, with no expectation of what will happen.

Maybe you are all familiar with active imagination and dream work. If not, then try it out by re-entering the dream-world in daylight. Even a dream where you lose your car keys is a start. What emerges? And crucially, what is the feeling? At first my dreams were nothing much - and then they started to make me pictures, and now the continuity is strange. I try to keep to the same one until we have nowhere else to go with it, and then I ask myself for another one please. I find that if I put in the work in daylight, the dreams will follow at night.