At Home In The Dark

Hillman: “So, to reach the fully subjective, a dream-worker must reach into the last pocket of objectivity, the dream-ego, its behaviors and its feelings, keeping them within the image. The job becomes one of subjecting the ego to the dream, dissolving it in the dream, by showing that everything done and felt and said by the ego reflects its situation in the image, i.e., that this ego is wholly imaginal. Not an easy job, for the ego is archetypically an upperworld phenomenon, strong in its heroic attitudes until, by learning how to dream, it becomes an imaginal ego.

An imaginal ego is at home in the dark, moving among images as one of them. Often there are inklings of this ego in those dreams where we are quite comfortable with absurdities and horrors that would shock the daylight out of waking consciousness."

The ego is archetypically an upperworld phenomenon. When we tell someone over coffee or in an email about a dream we had last night, we don't put the we or the I in quotation marks. We say "I" did this, or this happened to "me" without ever examining whether or not the "I" that seemed to dream is the same as the I who's drinking coffee and ruminating. Since that upperworld I - as has been said a million times - is not the stable and almost-concrete entity we're built to assume, it's clear that it isn't the same as the dreaming I. But that's a simplicity that masks a genuine issue: *Who is that dreamer?"* We lead ourselves to think it's the same person we are in the morning, out of habit or ease, who knows. But it is - we are - different. And Hillman is saying that instead of dragging that consciousness and its dream into the daylight, "we" should dive down into that underworld and look around.

"I" once had a dream where a teacher was in my house, second floor. He starts down the stairs. I follow. He turns and says, "Don't get too close to me." And yet I follow, into what PK Dick called the Tombworld. Cold, unmoving, grey, static, entropy done. And then I lost him.