Imagination Is Dreaming Us Awake
On the importance of increasing our imaginal capacity
Image: Ajar by Gavin Turk
Dear Depth-Writer,
Hello & welcome to Depth Writing With Dr Rachel. I’m super-excited you’ve joined me here for the first of a regular series of monthly meditations and related writing exercises on all things Jungian as they intersect with modern life.
From now I’m going to be calling these exercises ‘creative experiments’ because we are simply exploring, without any attachment to outcome or judgment, what we might discover about ourselves through the practice of depth-writing. Which is using writing as a tool to unlock our creativity and access the unconscious in order to meet ourselves as we really are and encounter what Carl Jung calls ‘the real psychic facts’.
In the same way as the free divers of old swam the depths in a single breath and returned with pearls (and maybe sometimes also with skeletons), we begin by plunging straight in with the imagination, as this is the vast ocean in which we’ll be learning to swim.
The imagination is fundamental to Jungian psychoanalysis because it’s through this creative super-power that we can begin to ‘see’ reality as it is beyond the smoke and mirrors of the unconscious beliefs that trick us into taking subjective assumptions for objective facts and the intellectual knowledge of our thinking minds for the whole truth.
This is not to say that our thinking minds, which are governed by our left brains and which are concerned with detail, judging, evaluating, forming opinions and analysing are not important. Without them, we’d be lacking the science that has led to so many progressive breakthroughs and the moral compass that grants us a sense of ethics and allows us to set healthy boundaries.
But the thinking mind only knows what it knows and problems arise when we live and act as if that’s all we are. Jung goes as far as to claim that to privilege the thinking, rational mind over the creative realm of the imagination is, itself, irrational;
‘Since we cannot possibly know the boundaries of something unknown to us, it follows that we are not in a position to set any bounds to the self. It would be wildly arbitrary and therefore unscientific to restrict the self to the limits of the individual psyche.’
While the thinking mind belongs to the faculties of the left brain, the imagination belongs to the functioning of the right brain - the engine room of our creativity and emotions, intuition and instinct, visions and dreams. More than a subjective inner capacity, imagination is an autonomous life force that connects us to a deeper level of reality outside of ourselves - and the mystery of everything that we know we don’t know.
Indeed, Jung takes the fact that our dreams generate images which we play no conscious role in creating as evidence of the imagination as something that happens to us, rather than something we consciously will. (There will be more on dreaming in future posts, so stay tuned).
As Albert Einstein (who Jung credits as an influence) famously said;
‘I am enough an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’
Going further than Einstein, Jung conceptualises the imagination as a higher form of knowledge. What is now understood as a major (if not the major) meta-skill, along with aptitudes such as empathy and resilience, it is by harnessing the power of the imagination that we increase our capacity for creative thinking, problem solving, learning and growth.
In other words, the imagination is fundamental to growth. Just as caterpillars are born with what are called ‘imaginal cells’ that lie dormant until they are ready to undergo the metamorphosis that will turn them into butterflies, it is through the imagination that we, too, have the potential to renew ourselves and be transformed.
Arguably, at a time of climate emergency and violent global turmoil, we need to develop our imaginal capacity - as those ancient free divers developed their lung capacity - more than ever in order to grasp a sense of who we are inside a larger, fundamentally healing, cosmological reality.
The iconoclastic science fiction writer Ursula K Le Guin, whose life-work was greatly influenced by Jung, claimed in a speech just before her death in 2018 that it’s through the poetic and mythic sensibility of the imagination that we invoke hope.
‘Hard times are coming when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.’
The ocean that’s both inside and outside, the imagination has the power to dream us awake.
What are your thoughts on the importance of the imagination?
Creative Experiments
Write a letter, poem, invocation, spell or prayer to the imagination, inviting it in. Carry it with you. Post it to a wall. Sleep with it under your pillow. Pick out lines and leave them out for yourself on post-it notes.
Taking inspiration from the Gavin Turk sculpture, Ajar (pictured above), imagine you are wandering in an open landscape preoccupied by your thoughts and feelings when a door appears, as if from nowhere. You open the door and step across the threshold. What happens next? Where does it lead?
Imagine you are a time traveller with the ability to visit the future. You can travel as far as next week, next year, ten years from now, or even to your point of departure through the door to the next life. What are you like? What is the world like? What one thing have you learned that you wish you’d known before?
What came up for you in these experiments?
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