Using Active Imagination to Bridge the Conscious and Unconscious: A Beginner's Guide

In Jungian psychology, active imagination is a deliberate practice that bridges the conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche.

It helps you gain self-knowledge, expand your consciousness, and live a more substantial and fulfilling life.

This beginner’s guide covers the main principles of active imagination.

I’ve drawn on two great books:

• Sacred Selfishness: A Guide to Living a Life of Substance - Bud Harris

• Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth - Robert Johnson

If you’re interested in learning more, I’d start with these. They include real-life examples of active imagination that can help you in your own practice.

Before we get into active imagination, let’s talk about imagination.

Einstein’s imagination

In a youthful dream, Einstein sped down a steep mountainside on a sled.

As he went faster and faster, he witnessed the stars above him refracting light into a spectrum of colours he'd never seen before. The image was so powerful that it stuck with him.

Einstein later maintained that he owed all his scientific achievements to his meditations on this dream and the thought experiments it provoked as he worked out his theory of relativity.

Imagination is key to creativity

We’re willing to accept the centrality of imagination in poetry and the arts, but perhaps less so in fields like science and psychology.

For Canadian author Robertson Davies, greatness in any field relies on the presence of imagination:

‘...between great poetry and depth psychology [the psychology of the unconscious] there is no division but that determined by the presence, or lack of imagination, for imagination is not dream-spinning but insight.’

As a cornerstone of creativity, it's hardly surprising that imagination can lead us to creative insights about ourselves, and this creative aspect can help us live more substantial and fulfilling lives.

Imagination is the place where our conscious and unconscious minds can meet, and when we engage it actively, we open up the borders of our conscious egos to the dynamic power of the unconscious.

What is active imagination?

Active imagination is the conscious use of the imagination to discover and come into relationship with unfamiliar aspects of ourselves.

It gives form and voice to these buried aspects, creating a line of communication with them in a creative process that can lead to growth and transformation.

On the surface, it seems so ridiculous and naive that it’s hard to consider it a serious psychological technique. It involves acknowledging and expressing the thoughts or images that arise from your imagination, and then actively dialoguing with them the way you would with another person.

This means actively listening to whatever the object of your imagination has to say.

Bud Harris sums it up nicely in Sacred Selfishness:

'The technique of using written dialogs in active imagination is simple and has the same goal as our other dialogs. We learn to talk with our anger, our envy, our weight, our illness, or what have you. And by setting this process up in a dialog format in our imaginations we can learn to listen to those features of ourselves and understand the parts they play in our lives more clearly.’

For Robert Johnson, it can also involve ‘entering into the action, the adventure or conflict that is spinning its story out in one’s imagination’.

Johnson cites this conscious participation as the aspect that transforms passive fantasy into active imagination.

It’s a way of breaking down the barriers that separate conscious from unconscious and allowing a flow of information between the two.

What can you dialogue with?

I'll let Harris answer this:

‘We can dialogue with almost anything we can imagine—with our emotions such as fear, anger, depression, anxiety, rage, sadness, courage, joy, desire; with physical symptoms such as weight, pain, headaches, diseases like cancer, tight necks, aching backs; with figures we meet in our dreams and fantasies such as men, women, animals, birds, storms, even inanimate objects like cars and houses; or with psychological aspects of ourselves that we may consider our inner critics, children, warriors, lovers, wisdom figures, rebels, and anything else that may represent an attitude or state of mind.’

Essentially, we can dialogue with any interior parts of ourselves.

We acknowledge the personalities residing in our unconscious, those personalities so often in conflict with our conscious ideas and behaviour. In this way, we access realms of the psyche that the conscious mind can’t access alone: we find ourselves within the dynamics of the unconscious.

We can dialogue with images too. Johnson describes the magical principle whereby experiencing the images means ‘we also directly experience the inner parts of ourselves that are clothed in the images’.

Inversely, creating images or labels for more abstract emotions is common: Nietzsche labelled his depression his dog, while Churchill called his his black dog.

Dialoguing with an image might be easier, and creates more distance between yourself and your experience.

How does active imagination work?

True change often requires a change in consciousness.

Active imagination opens the borders of the conscious mind to acknowledge and dialogue with those undervalued parts of yourself in a way that can expand and transform your consciousness.

There are voices buried in our unconscious: active imagination is a way of discovering these voices and listening to what they have to tell us. And as we discover and communicate with these fragments of our total self, we can begin to meld them into union.

Jung considered the conscious ego the tip of the iceberg, with the overwhelming majority of the personality lying below the surface in the unconscious.

The unconscious is an eternal source of renewal, and inner work practices like active imagination are a way of replenishing the conscious mind with the rich nutrients of the unconscious.

The fact that we’re engaging with these parts of ourselves symbolically is of little importance. Johnson emphasises the power of symbolic experience in the human psyche when we enter it consciously:

'Its intensity and its effect on us is often as concrete as a physical experience would be. Its power to realign our attitudes, teach us and change us at deep levels, is much greater than that of external events that we may pass through without noticing.'

Plus, listening to things like anger and depression helps you become more self-compassionate and understanding. You can also discover the origins and purposes of these more stereotypically negative aspects of yourself in a way that leads to conscious insights about who you are and how to live.

As stupid as it might sound or feel, the point is that whatever emerges comes from something within you and has something to teach you. We’re trained to find answers in the rational, but this is often the wrong place to look.

Dialoguing with these aspects means living in harmony with them rather than against them.

Why writing is important

Active imagination isn’t something that you can do mentally.

For Harris, writing down the dialogue is essential, whether you do it on paper or on a computer.

His note on journaling is profound:

‘When we begin journaling about our experiences of symptoms and dialoguing with them, we begin speaking with new voices, telling new stories. Rather than simply being victims we become once again what philosopher Kierkegaard referred to as “the editor of our life.” We become healers as well as sufferers.’

How do I know I'm not making it up or controlling the responses?

Harris states that even the most contrived fantasies emerge from within you and relate to your inner life.

The whole point of active imagination is to learn more about your unconscious aspects, and whatever comes into your conscious awareness must exist within you.

Taking precautions

The power of the unconscious can make it destructive, so I’ll end with a passage from Johnson’s book Inner Work on the importance of taking necessary precautions when practising active imagination:

‘You need to be particularly careful with Active Imagination. It should not be practiced unless you have someone available who is familiar with this art, someone who knows how to get you back to the ordinary earth if you should be overwhelmed by the inner world. Active Imagination is safe if we obey the rules and use common sense, but it is possible to get in too deep and feel as though we are sinking too far into the unconscious. Your helper can be either an analyst or a layperson who has some experience with Active Imagination. The main point is to have a friend you can call on if you lose your bearings.’