Excerpt: Dreams are NOT arbitrary. Dreams are a primary means of communication. Not convinced? These 37 quotes from Inner Work should change your mind.
“This is perhaps the essence of the meaning of these visionary experiences, as it is really the heart of Active Imagination itself: It is a way of learning from your own experience those profound truths of life that can’t be transferred from one person to another with words but can only be genuinely known through one’s own connection to the collective unconscious. In this sense, we can only learn what we already know at the unconscious level.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 218)
“It is as much the ego’s duty to bring [a] sense of responsibility to the creatures of the inner world as it is for us to tend to the welfare of our fellow humans in the outside world. It is the health of our own, inner selves that is at stake.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 190)
“The ego’s relationship to the huge unconscious is like that of a tiny cork floating in the ocean. We often feel like that. We feel like a cork that is being tossed about in the ocean of life, completely at the mercy of the waves and storms that push and pull us. We seem to have little control or power over anything. The cork is nevertheless morally equal to the ocean, because it has the power of consciousness! Although the ego is small, it has this peculiar power of awareness that we call consciousness, and that special, concentrated power gives it a position that is as necessary, as strong, and as valuable as the seemingly infinite richness of the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 184)
“For me, the seashore is a magical place that often appears in my dreams. When I don’t know how to start my Active Imagination, I frequently go to the seashore in my mind and start walking. Inevitably something happens or someone appears, and the imagination is launched. There have been a few days when I walked and walked, and almost nothing happened; sometimes you can grow weary walking. But generally, if you go to the inner place and search, you will find someone waiting for you.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 170)
“When a huge number of fantasies flood your mind, it often means that you haven’t been giving enough attention to the unconscious. It compensates your imbalance toward the outer world by flooding you with fantasy—which forces you into a kind of involuntary inner life.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 169)
“When you have a recurring fantasy that stays in your mind all day, it indicates that there is some inner problem that needs to be worked through.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 169)
“Everyone who begins this art [of Active Imagination] has a lot of preconceived ideas about who ought to be there and what these inner characters ought to say. People expect to hear immediately noble speeches by the Great Mother or profound wisdom from an inner guru. These things often happen, but just as often we find ourselves looking at the depression we have refused to face, the sense of loneliness, emptiness, or inferiority we’ve always run from.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 167)
“Even if a person is frivolous and deliberately tries to fabricate something, to conjure up something silly and stupid, to imagine a pure fiction, the material that comes up through the imagination still represents some hidden part of that individual. It can’t be made up from thin air. It has to come from somewhere inside the person who is producing the images.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 150)
“Any quality within you can be personified [through Active Imagination] and persuaded to clothe itself in an image so that you can interact with it. If you feel an inflation, you can go to your imagination and ask that inflation to personify itself through an image. If you vaguely feel a mood controlling you, you can do the same. It is the image that gives one a starting point. You can then enter into dialogue; you can interact; and you can move toward some kind of understanding.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 147)
“You should not try to ‘dress up’ your imagination and make it sound proper, grammatical, or ‘refined.’ The object is to experience and record whatever flows out of your unconscious honestly in its raw, spontaneous form. You are not doing creative writing for other people’s eyes. This is a private matter between you and your own unconscious, between you and God, so let it be as rough, crude, incoherent, embarrassing, beautiful, or unregenerate as it may be when it comes spontaneously out of your unconscious. The results will be more honest—and more real.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 133)
“The dream forced me to realize that the most important thing in life to me is friendship and feeling-exchange with other people. I don’t need to have many acquaintances, but I require good friendships that involve a deep level of communication, whether it be an exchange of ideas or the simple joy of being together.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 133)
“It is not a good idea to try to make a ritual out of talking about your dream or trying to explain yourself to people. Talking tends to put the whole experience back on an abstract level. It gets contaminated with your desire to present yourself in the best light. Instead of a vivid, private experience, you wind up with an amorphous, collective chat. The best rituals are physical, solitary, and silent: These are the ones that register most deeply with the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 99)
“Opt for the interpretation that teaches you something new, rather than one that seems to confirm your ingrained opinions and prejudices. remember, the main function of a dream is to communicate something to you that you don’t know, that you are unaware of, that lives in the unconscious. Your dream will not waste your time by telling you what you already know and understand; therefore, you should choose the interpretation that challenges your existing ideas rather than one that merely repeats what you already think you know.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 94)
“The process of inner growth demands that we examine consciously everything that motivates us.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 72)
“You will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 71)
“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)