Dreams

James Hillman, a third generation Jungian, takes the dream as the paradigm on the psyche
having close association with death. Dream-work builds an imaginal vessel, or, as DH Lawrence wrote in a poem, "Build yourself a Ship of Death." What matters is soul not life.

Homer thought dreams issued from the underworld of Hades. The general attitude about dreams in the West is negative: they are unreal. Hillman thinks dreams are poems about themselves. They emanate from a faraway pneumatic world that is a dimension not available in itself. Unlike Freud and Jung, Hillman refuses to bring dreams into the day-world. We shouldn't interfere. Underworld is cosmos in its own right. Hades is the brother of Zeus--his shadow brother. The underworld is a purely psychic world whose mythological figures are metaphorical statements about the soul's comportment beyond life. Dreams are like dark spots, a shadow world in the depths where this world is experience as a metaphor. ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS. During sleep we are aware and alive; in life asleep. The Imaginal ego at home in the dark, moving among images as one of them. We have a foot in each world, the shadowy "between" of the underworld. The home of the soul is a twilight zone. Matter is turned to soul: soul-making. To encounter the realm of the soul, one must die first

This was certainly the lesson of THE INFERNO. I was aware I was in a shadow world, I was behind the painted scenery of ordinary life, being a ghost among ghosts. Literalness melted into thin air. I was an airy something that could walk through walls. Our substance comes from death. Hades becomes the archetypal background of life. The underworld is is "devoid of life," that is, liberated from our entanglements in the literalistic perspectives of the so-called real life. Reality is down there.