I’m going to set aside all illusions of propriety and socially accepted means of communicating and just come out with the crude vulgarity of it; If this book had a cock I would fuck it. James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld is the literary equivalent of lying in an exotic wilderness candlelit bedroom, naked, aroused and a little bit scared (or maybe that’s just me). Most of you won’t understand why this book turns me on, it’s not a romantasy – no sex happens in it – but Darkness is sexy. Moisture is sexy. Creative proses are sexy. Challenge is sexy. Dirt is sexy. Nature is sexy. Revolution is sexy. Paganism is sexy. And based on those assertions, goddamn this book is sexy as fuck. Reading it was an invitation to reconsider the tragedy I’d written for myself, and a hot-breathe whisper validating my chthonic worldview.1
The Unconscious as Underworld
Hillman reimagines Freud’s theories as mythopoetics and expands on Jung’s collective unconscious, offering us a perspective that is rooted much deeper than the soil – it goes right down to the icy halls of Hades. If it seems strange that underworld talk elicits a sexual response, I’ll remind you that we can’t talk about the underworld unconscious without talking about sex. After all, the marriage of Hades began with rape, and in dreams, psychic violation abounds. We all have dreams that penetrate waking life, sleepy one night stands that linger, waking ego at odds with our dream actions, wildly uncomfortable with the images unearthed by sleep. Hillman’s unconscious is Hades; and Hades makes his own rules. In the underworld, it’s perfectly normal to have sex with family, to shape-shift, to harm animals, for landscapes to change drastically, to get into cars with strangers; Hades turns morals inside out. This is a land where time and space don’t operate the same way as they do in the light of day. You won’t dream in upper world laws, because dreams don’t come from the upper world.
The Ego Image
Diverging from Freud and Jung, Hillman states that the dream ego is also an image, separate from the waking ego, observable, no more or less important than any other image in the dream.
“the ego in dreams is also a wholly subjective figure, or shade, who is now voided of the I who lay himself down to sleep. Ego-behaviour in the dream reflects the pattern of the image and the relations within the image, rather than the patters and relations of the dayworld.”2
Ever had a dream in which you are appalled by your own actions? This is why. The dream ego is a separate entity from the ego of the daytime, though Hillman notes that the day ego and dream ego are related, they should not be confused with each other.
He makes a distinction between two different ego manifestations: the heroic ego, and the imaginal ego. The heroic ego is Herculean; a warrior that combats and interprets, striving to turn lights on in the dark. Hillman states, “The villian in the underworld is the heroic ego, not Hades”.3 The heroic ego is a killer of image. He slaughters as he interprets, triumphantly nailing the carcasses to his dayworld walls.
The imaginal ego is poetic, instead of wielding weapons of interpretation, walks slowly and with intention, allowing time to adjust its eyes to the lack of light, it makes its home in the dark. Instead of interpreting the image, the imaginal ego sits with it, gets to know it, and holds space. Hillman advocates for an imaginal approach to the unconscious, which is a radical divergence from both Freud and Jung’s dream interpretation.
Dreamwork is Soul work in Preparation for Death
Hillman isn’t telling us that we shouldn’t look at dreams in the light of day, but that we need to sit in the discomfort of their underworld implications, to recognize their shade qualities and know where their origin and allegiance lies. According to Hillman, dreams are a means of alchemizing dayworld experiences;
“We no longer take them at face value, referring back to real events in a literal world of the day. Instead we imagine that the dream is digesting certain bits and pieces of the day, converting its facts into images. The dream is less a comment on the day than a digestive process of it, a breakdown and assimilation of the dayworld within the labyrinthine tracts of the psyche.”4
This inner alchemy is soul-work. As Sleep is the younger sister of Death, her job is to introduce us, to put us into contact with the realm of the dead and acquaint us with a world wholly different from that of waking life.
“Each dream is a practice in entering the underworld, a preparation of the psyche for death5”
As such, dreams are not meant to be pillaged for advice on waking life. They are not simply commentaries on past events or revealed wishes. Dreams serve a deeper purpose, and dream images are useful simply in their autonomous ‘being’. To exploit the dream for the purpose of dayworld use is to kill the image, a slaughter akin to poaching wildlife.
Inner Nature and Instinct
The dream image is inner wildlife. Hillman’s passion for the image is akin to a naturalist observing nature, a passion we also see in Jung’s Archaic Man. As a part of nature, the dream speaks to instinctual pressures.
“At night in sleep when control is relaxed, the seething cauldron of the id with its libidinal desires would boil up and scald us with polymorphous perverse sexual wishes were there not some psychic censoring mechanism that allowed us to sleep. This mechanism, which turns the sexual urges into acceptable disguises, is the dream-work. All its complicated labor is the transfiguration of latent sexual wishes into manifest imagery. This imagery partly allows the id to let off steam and partly keeps us lulled from what is truly (sexually) going on. The dream-work is so important because it gratified both the sexual instinct and the instinct to sleep. dream work…fufills instinctual demands.”6
Dream-work is a means of processing instinct and it can serve as an invitation to look at your own suppressed qualities – though this is an employment of the heroic ego. What parts of your own nature have you buried in iced bars deep down in the bottom of your psyche?
Sexuality is a powerful instinct, one that threatens the illusion of civilization within us. You will be hard pressed to find anyone who does not languish under the pressures of sexual repression. For women, it’s often the puritanical good girl afraid to get her cunt wet – proverbial sweat and cum stained clothes contrasted by the high held purity of white robes, selfless, male-centered service of the spotless Virgin – for fear we might wake the leviathan coiled inside our hips. Why are we ashamed of our desire for sex worship? The patriarchal attitude of feminine sexuality is to bottle that shit up. Send it down to the abyss and throw away the key. Many of us do just that, especially if we were raised in the monothestic sky-cult tradition of Father God.
Dreams are a means of releasing pressure that does not compromise our waking life. Ethics are upper world phenomena and when operating in the upper world, you must know and adhere to your a-priori positions in order to not become an asshole. The underworld is inner nature and therefore morally neutral. It is not a reliable guide in how to behave in the waking world.
This is why, for me, The Dream and the Underworld evokes a sensual response. Hillman’s process is less cerebral and more somatic and this is what I look for in theory – not that it would touch my mind but that it would penetrate my body, heat it up, and apply some healthy pressure.
The Climax
So what is the benefit of engaging with dreams if not the sweaty climax of interpretation? Relationship; dialogue over dominance. As I am currently exploring my own flavor of dreamwork, I’ll save expanding on this for another day.
Hillman’s imaginal ego is consciousness set free of our western cultural worship of logos – it is a poetic consciousness that feels like becoming element. Hillman talks of ego centricity as hero worship and rejects our cultural humanistic hubris, putting the human animal in his place – back into the plurality of nature. His trajectory downwards (illustrated by moving backwards from Jung instead of forward)7 reveals his fearlessness in the face of “regression” and his call to analogize over interpreting dreams8 offers space for our inner legion to teem in multiplicities. The monotheistic view of Jung makes me feel like I’m being boiled in a soup where all ingredients must merge. Hillman allows us to stay frog legs and eye of newt; to experience plurality instead of “integrate”. Though Hillman’s polytheistic approach has been widely criticized as useless to therapists, I like it and heartily disagree with this criticism. He approaches dream images with passion and reverence, creating a link between the unconscious as a wild landscape and its contents psychic equivalents to wild creatures worthy in their own right, creatures with autonomy who deserve our reverence and respect. This reverence for nature alone is enough to flood the proverbial basement. Be still my beating heart.
This post was inspired by my response to the required readings for my summer term, Dreamwork course, mod 8. Some verbiage herein overlaps with my discussion post and my submitted final paper. I make this note to avoid “self-plagerism” – which is apparently, a serious academic offense. The term itself feels like an oxymoron and I’m not entirely sure what the fuck it means. ++++footnote to this footnote: I understand what it means, I just think it’s stupid ↩︎- p. 102 ↩︎
- p. 113 ↩︎
- p. 96 ↩︎
- p. 133 ↩︎
- p. 120 ↩︎
- p. 122 ↩︎
- p. 130 + A Blue Fire, 1989, p. 244-245 ↩︎
