Imaginal Method

We work on dreams not to strengthen the ego but to make psychic reality, to make life matter through death, to make soul by intensifying the imagination ... My emphasis is upon shaping, handling, and doing something with psychic stuff. It is a psychology of craft rather than a psychology of growth.

... What we take out of dreams, what we get to use from dreams, what we bring up from dreams, is all to the surface. Depth is in the invisible connection; and it is working with our hands on the invisible connections where we cannot see, deep in the body of the night, penetrating, assembling and differentiating, debridings, churning, kneading -- this constitutes the work on dreams. Always we are doing precision work, but with invisibilities, with ambiguities, and with moving materials.

-- James HIllman, Dream and Underworld,, 137-8, 140