Hillman Dream Analysis

In my time studying psychology I’ve found dream analysis to be one of the most interesting yet misunderstood aspects of examining the self. In graduate school we briefly touched on Freud’s methods, which, in short, meant looking at the latent drives and desires behind the dream images via free association, and Jung’s methods which involved his use of the collective unconscious and compensation.

While these are widely accepted forms of dream analysis and are valuable to many people, neither of these sat completely well with me. They seemed to me to rely too heavily on someone else’s pre-existing analytical take. To state it a bit simply, the psychoanalyst would take a “top down” approach wherein they would listen to a person’s descriptions of their dreams and dream images, and then “fit” those into these aforementioned pre-existing boxes.

Now, of course these boxes themselves are nuanced and the results of years of study, but I see individual humans, and especially the internal experiences of their own psyches, as dependent on so many moving parts. For example what stimuli you are exposed to, what decisions you make in regard to that stimuli, if you have been traumatized, and how you responded to that trauma, etc. Taking all that into account, how can any two humans’ dreams and dream images mean the same thing? They can’t. Therefore the answer, for me, was instead of taking this “top down” approach, I needed something that took a more organic, “personalized” approach to what one’s psyche was producing in what basically amounts to a hyper-meditative and freethinking state, i.e., sleep.

To take a quick detour, I also need to mention that Freud and Jung were neither the first nor only individuals to look at dreams. Many ancient cultures from all parts of the world provided valuable insights on the nature, meaning and powers of dreams and dream analysis. However, as a white man raised and educated in the West, Freudian and Jungian were the two main methods that I was exposed to.

Which brings me to James Hillman, who was a student of, and eventual collaborator with, Jung. When I began to read Hillman (of which I am still in the nascent stages of that process having only read A Blue Fire, which I highly recommend, btw) I was so refreshed by his concepts of the individual psyche, or soul. He rejected the more scientific, aka “top down,” methods of psychoanalysis by focusing on what the organic and archaic soul alive in each human was expressing. He didn’t see dreams as expressions of compensations for the repressed desires of childhood or as fitting into some predetermined archetypal narrative.

Rather, he saw each dream and each dream image as having different meanings for different people. He saw the dream images as those things that one’s soul is drawn to and that which is personally meaningful to the individual in regards to expressing what is important and what paths of development to take.

Hillman viewed psychopathologies in this same manner. That, in short, one’s mental health problems were the soul, or psyche, pointing the way toward what one needed to work on, rather than some scientific symptom that had a predetermined meaning and some reductively biological etiology and solution.

So, as you can see there is a lot of self in this method of dream analysis rather than the therapist getting in there with their interpretations. Also, the images are the foundation of Hillman’s methods. He simply says, “stick with the image.”  For example, Hillman discussed one of his patient’s dreams about a big black snake:

“…the moment you’ve defined the snake, interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions … and you’ve lost the snake. The task of (my) analysis is to keep the snake there, the black snake…see, the black snake’s no longer necessary the moment it’s been interpreted, and you don’t need your dreams any more because they’ve been interpreted.”

He is basically saying that if you try to “interpret” the snake, that is fit it into some predetermined meaning, you’ve lost its personal, soul-based meaning. Furthermore, if we have all these preexisting boxes to put one’s dream images into, why would you even need to continue dreaming or, taking it further, even need to dream in the first place? If the dream is your soul communicating to you, but we already “know” how every soul communicates, then what would the point of said communication be? There would be no point, and therefore no need to dream.

In my summation, Hillman was basically saying:  don’t interpret the dream, as the dream has already interpreted you. The trick then is figuring out what your individual soul, or psyche, is saying to you, about you, about the path you are one or need to be on, etc. And each individual is going to have different images and different meanings.

Ok great. So why am I writing about this? Well, I had a dream recently and it was so vivid I had to write it down as soon as I woke up. I wrote down the images and the situations that were presented to me by my soul. I then tried, as best I could, to use my conscious mind to suss out the personal meaning for me. What follows is what I came up with.

I had a dream that I was waiting in a parking lot in the Shaw’s supermarket on Grove Street in Braintree, Massachusetts. I was waiting to be picked up by someone as I was moving into a new house that I had purchased. A U-Haul type truck picked me up and the driver was a non-entity. They had a body, and were driving the truck but were faceless. Remember when Neo’s mouth disappeared in that interrogation scene in The Matrix? The driver’s entire face was like that.

While I was sitting in the passenger seat I saw this giant bug on the floor of the truck, which was see-through. Similar to the bug in The Matrix interrogation scene! The bug was dark brown and slick, long with thousands of legs and a huge pair of pincers on the end of its face. Like on those bugs that Willie has to deal with in Temple of Doom. As I type the details of this bug I am getting squirmy and grossed out but that did not happen in the dream.

As I was chatting with the non-entity driver, of which there was no dialogue but we were communicating in some way, I just calmly moved my body to the side of my seat furthest away from where the bug was on the floor of the truck. As the floor was see-through, I could tell that we were driving on a dirt road and that there was a small opening in this clear floor a bit behind the seat.

As the bug continued to crawl closer to me and around my feet, I then simply put my knees on the arm rests of the seats and continued “chatting” with the non-entity driver. I watched as the bug began to try and grab something on the floor, like a piece of food or another small bug. As the bug wrestled with this in the direction of the opening I surmised that it would soon fall out of the opening. The bug put its face, with its huge pincers, in the opening and its body weight carried it out of the opening. I then sat back down in the chair.

We then soon arrived at this big, palatial house. It was that golden hour where the sun was setting and an amber glow was cast everywhere. We got out of the truck and three kids on BMX bicycles came up and asked me in a wondrous way if this was my house. “Yes it is,” I said. This is where the dream ended.

What does this mean from a Hillman perspective where I don’t interpret the dream externally? Rather, I look at it from the perspective that the dream has already interpreted me.

The context is that I was moving. I was in transition. Literally being transported. In “real life” I am in a time of great personal and professional transition, being in early sobriety and having recently suffered a significant career setback while trying to establish a new professional path. But I was also progressing, changing. I knew I was being taken somewhere new, aka moving, and I was happy about this. I was calm.

The driver, who appeared as a non-entity was my sublimated ego which was now under the control of my psyche, or my soul, rather than the other way around. The key is that in “real life” I have been working to sublimate/modify these concepts and their dynamics within myself. Rather than being a constantly over-thinking, overly-directive, self-obsessed ego monster that is always analyzing, judging and directing my thinking and behavior in a negative way, and that is always fighting against these forces, I’m now trying to let go, listen to the deepest voices of growth and development within myself (my psyche) and follow them. If I can heed these forces and these voices, rather than fight them with my flawed ego, if I let them literally “take the wheel,” they will lead me into the positive, transformative and growth-oriented situations that my soul needs.

In this, I could even say that I am trying to live on auto-pilot, which is what was happening in the dream. Some faceless, nameless, vague force (my soul? the universe?) was driving the van and I was chatting with it comfortably rather than injecting my flawed, human will and ego into the scenario.

The bug was an unexpected visitor. A life form, yes, but I see it as a force or entity that arose in my process of change, growth and progress. A glitch. Literally, a “bug” in the system. In this case, the glitch was the aforementioned significant career setback and substance abuse and perhaps all the craptastic residue from years of poor decisions that I am trying to let go. I feel it also represented all the things, situations and people that I needed to let slowly crawl away from me slowly rather than stay attached to them based on fear of change.

How I dealt with that glitch in the dream was not to freak out, or squirm, or get lost in reactivity and fear. Rather, I simply shifted my position as needed to keep the process of transportation, growth, change and progress going smoothly. As the bug shifted again, so I shifted again. The driver, which again was my sublimated ego now under the control of my soul rather than the other way around, stayed the course while the bug worked its way out. Into the ether it went.

After that, I (or we, if we think of the ego as not “my ego” but “this ego,” the soul as “this soul) successfully arrived home. Arriving at this home I felt soul-safe but also complete. Like everything was right with the world. . The amber glow was akin to the golden place inside one’s self that can be accessed via meditation, sometimes called the Golden Flower.

The kids arriving on the bikes were literally other souls who were drawn to this “home” I had arrived at via a process of transportation, growth and change. They were souls that had already been dipped in gold and were there to welcome me to this wonderful place. Like myself, they were marveling at my new home. Marveling at what we can create when we engage in a personally meaningful process of growth and change and don’t get sidetracked by the bugs. Perhaps they were harbingers of the new friends I will have in my life as I continue on this course.

In summation, using Hillman’s dream analysis methods, this dream let me know that I am moving in the right direction regarding my process of growth and change, and that trying to transport myself into a new dimension of living is the righteous path for me. It shows me that my will, my flawed human ego-based thinking and behavior has gotten me to a place where I need to allow the faceless, universal power of the soul be the driver, but also that I need to be active while in the passenger seat. It also shows me that bugs, or glitches, are always going to come up but if I react to them with calmness and dignity I can continue on my journey of positivity and self-development. The result of which is arriving home where the sun is always be setting and other souls will be there to greet you and love you like awed children.

Let me know about your dreams and what they may mean from a Hillman perspective in the comments below!