“This is probably the single most important principle in dream work—the one that determines whether you will find the wisdom in your dreams. We have to recognize that dreams are intricate tapestries of symbolism, and each image represents something going on within our own selves.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 69)
“The unconscious has the habit of borrowing images from the external situation and using those images to symbolize something that is going on inside the dreamer. Your dream may borrow the image of your next-door neighbor, your spouse, or your parent and use that image to refer to something inside you.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 68)
“If you take your dreams as a reflection of the unconscious dynamics within you, you are most likely to get to the heart of the matter; if, however, you apply the dream on the external level, it usually turns out to be superficial. It is on the inner level that you can change life-patterns most profoundly; it is at the inner level that your dream is usually aimed.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 67)
“Our culture teaches us to focus on the external world, so we jump to the conclusion that our dreams are talking about something on the outside. This is a collective prejudice we suffer from: We spontaneously assume that only the outer world has any importance. The true significance of the inner world becomes more clear when we begin to realize that almost everything we do, every reaction we have, every decision we make, every relationship we form, ultimately results from our inner qualities and inner dynamics. Everything is controlled by the huge energy systems that propel us from within, that determine most of what we think and do.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 67)
“There was an old tradition in the Christian Church that one had not prayed unless one’s lips had moved. This idea expresses a psychological truth: Something physical has to happen. This is why it is so important that you write your examples down on paper. When you physically write those examples, the connections with your dream become clear and definite.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 66)
“How the shadow appears in a dream depends on the ego’s attitude. For example, if a man’s attitude is friendly toward his inner shadow, and he is willing to grow and change, the shadow will often appear as a helpful friend, a ‘buddy,’ a tribal brother who helps him in his adventures, backs him up, and teaches him skills. If he is trying to repress his shadow, it will usually appear as a hateful enemy, a brute or monster who attacks him in his dreams. The same principles apply to a woman. Depending on her relationship to her shadow, she may appear as a loving sister or as a frightful witch.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 50)
“Even a short, seemingly insignificant dream tries to tell us something that we need to know Dreams never waste our time. If we take the trouble to listen to the ‘little’ dreams, we find that they carry important messages.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 44)
“There is nothing manly in being angry, but a gentle calm is both more human and therefore more virile. It is the gentle who have strength, sinew, and courage—not the indignant and complaining. The closer to control of emotion, the closer to power. Anger is as much a sign of weakness as is pain.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 111)
“None of us is just one thing. We are not monodimensional creatures; we are rich combinations of the infinitely varied archetypes. Each of us is part heroine or hero and part coward, part parent and part child, part saint and part thief. It is in learning to identify these great archetypal motifs within ourselves, learning to honor each one as a legitimate human trait, learning to live out the energy of each in a constructive way, that we make inner work a great odyssey of the spirit.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 34)
“It is in [the] exchange between the ego and the various characters who rise up from the unconscious and appear in my imagination that I begin to bind the fragmented pieces of myself into a unity. I begin to know, and learn from, the parts of myself I had never known before.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 26)
“Calculated honesty is a stiletto. There is nothing more degrading than the friendship of wolves: avoid that above all. The good, honest, kindly man has it in his eyes, and you cannot mistake him.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 99)
“Our English word fantasy derives from the Greek word phantasía. The original meaning of this word is instructive: It meant: ‘a making-visible.’ It derived from the verb that means ‘to make visible, to reveal.’ The correlation is clear: The psychological function of our capacity for fantasy is to make visible the otherwise invisible dynamics of the unconscious psyche.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 23)
“Our culture in the twentieth century has a tremendous collective prejudice against the imagination. It is reflected in the things people say: ‘You are only imagining things,’ or, ‘That is only your fantasy, not reality.’ In fact, no one ‘makes up’ anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate in the unconscious. Imagination, properly understood, is a channel through which this material flows to the conscious mind. To be even more accurate, imagination is a transformer that converts the invisible material into images the conscious mind can perceive.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 22)
“Since dream images make no sense in ordinary terms, people dismiss them as ‘weird’ or meaningless, but actually, dreams are completely coherent. If we take the time to learn their language, we discover that every dream is a masterpiece of symbolic communication. The unconscious speaks in symbols, not to confuse us, but simply because that is its native idiom.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 20)
“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach–waiting for a gift from the sea.”
Anne Morrow Lindberg, Gift from the Sea
“Just as a burning fire inherently exudes heat, the unconscious inherently generates symbols. It is simply the nature of the unconscious to do so. As we learn to read those symbols we gain the ability to perceive the workings of the unconscious within us. This ability to produce symbols affects more than just our dreams: All of human life is nourished by the flow of symbolic imagery from the wellsprings of the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 20)
“The world of dreaming, if we only realized it, has more practical and concrete effect on our lives than outer events do. For it is in the world of dreaming that the unconscious is working out its powerful dynamics. It is there that the great forces do battle or combine to produce the attitudes, ideals, beliefs, and compulsions that motivate most of our behavior.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 19)
“Each dream communicates information that isn’t know consciously by the dreamer. It therefore takes some real effort, some stretching of our capacities, to get a hold on what the dream is saying. If the interpretation comes too easily, it is not likely to be as accurate or as deep.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 15)