Access the Unconscious with Active Imagination

By: Dr. Denise Renye

Human beings have a conscious and unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is powerful in that regulates your heartbeat and breathing (among other automatic processes). However, it also stores memories and information your conscious mind may not be aware of. For instance, if you have a nightmare that you’re drowning, your unconscious mind may be telling you, “I’m overwhelmed; the world feels like too much.” Yet during the day, you may brush this feeling aside and ignore it.

The unconscious has been studied and worked with by analysts for over a century. It was first named by a physician in the mid-1500s. It is a complex concept and field but one that can be understood by everyone so as to have a deeper understanding of the Self and what may seem like mysteriously motivated behaviors and ways of being in daily life.

The inestimable Carl Jung developed a technique called active imagination to bridge the conscious with the unconscious. It can help people meet the unknown parts of themselves when applied in dreamwork or even with psychedelic integration work. Your unconscious is consistently communicating with you and the more you work with the unconscious, the happier, healthier, and more integrated you may feel. That’s what Jung is speaking to in his famous quote, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

How do you make the darkness conscious, though? There are a plethora of ways you can explore this in depth psychotherapy, but in this blog we’re focusing on active imagination. I’m a fan of Robert Johnson who outlines an active imagination approach in Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.

The 4-Step Active Imagination Process

Step 1: Invite in the unconscious. Slow down and enter into a contemplative state so the unconscious has room to bubble up to the surface. Allow your mind to begin focusing inward so you slowly think less about the external world. This may be done by sitting quietly or focusing first on sounds you can hear farther away. Then sounds outside of the building, sounds you can hear inside the building, sounds you can hear inside the room, and finally focusing on contact and connection with the sound and feel your beating heart.  Allow the focus to meander as it floats inward. Take a few deep breaths to come back into your body and at any time the mind gets caught up in thoughts, worries, or ruminations. Gently calm your mind by refocusing on inviting the unconscious to come forward. There is plenty of room for it here.

Step 2: Dialogue and Experience. When you’re ready, when you feel like you’ve made contact with your unconscious, you’re ready to begin a dialogue. You’re “giving yourself over to the imagination and letting it flow,” to quote Johnson. This is a practice of surrender. The key here is to let the inner figures have a life of their own. Approach these inner figures, be they images or characters, like you would a friendly stranger. If they’re reticent, start by asking, “Who are you?” and then wait for a reply. Pause and wait in the silence.

You’re approaching these inner figures with gentleness and curiosity. You’re dialoguing and that means allowing space for the inner figures to respond. Be open. It could also be that the inner figures want to do more than talk and instead want to engage you in some activity or perhaps even a journey. It could be via drawing or another type of interactive art, such as spontaneous body movement.  In this case, write down the experience and respond however feels right to you. That could also mean declining the inner figure’s invitation!

If you decline, that could lead to a heated discussion and is great fodder for the active imagination process. You and your unconscious are engaging in conflict and this can reveal deep insights.

Step 3: Add the ethical element of values. You’ve invited your unconscious in, you’ve engaged with it, but that doesn’t mean the unconscious is given free rein. It’s your duty as a conscious human being to set boundaries, to apply an ethical stance. Your unconscious doesn’t care about values like justice, fairness, or protecting the defenseless. No, your unconscious wants what it wants. Your unconscious may want to murder someone, for instance, but that doesn’t mean you should actually go out and kill that person!

You are a person with values who weighs what to do versus what not to do given the circumstances and all parties involved. However, knowing what your unconscious has to say will allow you to show up differently. To go back to our murder example, knowing this information, perhaps the best course of action is to remove yourself from interacting with the person that you so intensely dislike. Or maybe it means getting curious about what’s triggering you so much and working through it with a well-trained therapist so you no longer have the murderous impulse.

Step 4: Make it concrete with physical ritual. Now that you’ve engaged with your active imagination, it’s time to do something concrete and ritualistic. That word, ritual, may be unfamiliar to you but simply put, a ritual is a group of actions performed for their symbolic value that are done in a specific order of relevance for the topic at hand. Modern Western society has all but lost the practice of ritual, yet there’s a hunger for it. So much so that one of my offerings is ritual and ceremonial psychology.

In the case of active imagination, you’re making an abstract process real. You’re bringing the unconscious to your physical, earthbound life. Again, ethics are important here. Harming yourself or someone else is not what I’m referring to. Instead, you’re going to engage in a ritual. Maybe that means painting an image or scene. Perhaps it’s physically mimicking an inner figure, like embodying a bird by flapping your arms. A ritual could also be something like drawing a line in the sand and jumping over it to signify you’re ready to move forward and making concrete a symbolic, or inner, delineation.

It's up to you to determine what feels most appropriate regarding the ritualized portion of your active imagination. It may be tempting to skip this step but resist because the physical portion is how your experience is made real. It’s how it becomes something more than theoretical and turns into something you can take with you, something you can use in your life. In other words, an integration.

For more on active imagination, check out the reference below and be sure to subscribe to my newsletter. You’ll be the first to know when my new ebook drops.

Reference

Johnson, Robert. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. New York: Harpercollins, 1986.