Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

More on Fantasies 111
you listen to what it says back. You write this down to make it real,
to give it substance. That’s the difference between active imagination
and a daydream. If you don’t fix it in time and space, it’s pie
in the sky.
Active imagination can also take the form of dreaming a dream
on—you pick up the action at the end of a dream and imagine what
might happen next. This is a good way to learn more about your
complexes, but to do it successfully you have to still your skeptical,
rational mind, which will call it nonsense and say you made it all
up. And of course you did—but who is “you”? Nonsense it may
seem, but wisdom it may hold.
Jung emphasized that for active imagination to be psychologically
useful, which is to say transformative, one has to move beyond
a merely aesthetic appreciation of the action or images and
take an ethical stand toward them—relate them to what is happening
in your life, and judge their meaning in that context:
As a rule there is a marked tendency simply to enjoy this interior entertainment
and to leave it at that. Then, of course, there is no real
progress but only endless variations on the same theme, which is not
the point of the exercise at all. . . . If the observer understands that
his own drama is being performed on this inner stage, he cannot remain
indifferent to the plot and its dénouement. He will notice, as
the actors appear one by one and the plot thickens, that they all have
some purposeful relationship to his conscious situation, that he is being
addressed by the unconscious and that it causes these fantasyimages
to appear before him. 109
Recognizing your own involvement, you are then obliged to enter
into the process with your personal reactions, just as if you were
one of the fantasy figures—as if the drama being enacted were real.
As indeed it is, for psychic facts are quite as real as table-tops. If
you place yourself in the drama as you really are, not only does it
gain in actuality but you also create, by your criticism of the fantasy,
an effective counterbalance to its tendency to get out of hand.
109 Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 706.