The Dream and the Underworld

by James Hillman

In a deepening of the thinking begun in The Myth of Analysis and Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman develops the first new view of dreams since Freud and Jung. In a profound extension of Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious, Hillman goes back to classical theories in terms of the poetics of mythology. He relates our dreaming life to the myths of the underworld--the dark side of the soul, its images and shadows--and to the gods and figures of death. This leads to a revisioning of dream interpretation in relation to the psychology of dying. He concludes with the long section on specific dream images and themes as they appear in psychological praxis.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Mythology, Psychoanalysis, Spirituality, Occult

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

James Hillman (1926-2011) was an American psychologist. He served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944 to 1946, after which he attended the Sorbonne in Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950.

In 1959, he received his PhD from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and founded a movement toward archetypal psychology, was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969.

In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art. His magnum opus, Re-visioning Psychology, was written in 1975 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978.

Retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27, 2011 from bone cancer.

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strange and radical book, especially from a man who later achieved very mainstream success in his field with The Soul's Code. Hillman here tries to reverse our relationship to dreams inherited from Jung and Freud.

He says that these two titans were too prone to fish out dreams from the darkness of our souls and fry them in the light of day in the fires of our waking rational consciousness in order to dissect, comprehend, and consume them. To oppose this Hillman posits that dreams are a literal journey into the underworld where our souls live and interact with the dead and gods and mythical figures. These gods and mythical figures are acted out in our dreams by figures more familiar to us, such as friends and relatives, as gods and mythical figures cannot be represented directly. In order to understand these journeys we must resist reducing their meaning(s) by applying waking rational consciousness to them. Instead we must contemplate dreams as works of soul art that can not be summarized; we must so to speak transport our waking consciousness into this underworld and let it absorb the journey's meaning through direct experience.

This underworld which we experience through dreams is closer to being our true reality than the conscious sunlit surface of this earth. Our souls live fully in this underworld and never completely leave it, and so it's in our own best interests to train our conscious minds to conform to the dictates of the underworld, as it is more truly our home than the sunlit earth, rather than trying to force the weird ambiguous multivalent unlimitedness of the underworld into packets of conscious facts and knowledge.

[John Kulm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed the way I look at dreams, or maybe the book taught me what my heart always wanted me to understand. Hillman looks at the dream as happening in the “Underworld” – a place of death – and wants us to enter into that world to understand the dream instead of trying to drag the dream up into the day-world by interpreting it.

Some quotes from the book:

“Freud’s method projects the persons in a dream back over the bridge into the dream-day, even if for the sake of their latent meaning. We associate my dream-brother and dream-father to my day-brother and day-father and, by this association, return the dream to the day. Jung’s method of interpretation on the subjective level takes the dream persons into the subject of the dreamer. They become expressions of my psychic traits. They are introjected into my personality. In neither method do we ever truly leave the personal aspect of the dream persons, and thus they remain in the upperworld. Dare I say it loud and clear? The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is numen.”

“Public performance on a stage, perhaps because it puts us into the underworld of theatre, also constellates the curious interplay between life-soul and image-soul. The almost depersonalization experience of stage fright makes one feel deserted by one’s soul. All that one memorized and trained for has suddenly vanished. It is as if another soul must play the role, and this moment of going on stage is like a rite de passage, a transition into death.”

“For a dream image to work in life it must, like a mystery, be experienced as fully real. Interpretation arises when we have lost touch with the images, when their reality is derivative, so that this reality must be recovered through conceptual translation. Then we try to replace its intelligence with ours instead of speaking to its intelligence with ours.”


Hillman notes that when we see a killer in a dream, we tend to fear him. But Hillman looks at this figure as a helper who is trying to initiate us into the Underworld land-of-the-dead; the dream world:
“There is a divine death figure in the killer, either Hades, or Thanatos, or Kronos-Saturn, or Dis Pater, or Hermes, a death demon who would separate consciousness from it life attachments.

Hillman, in one section of the book describes the circus as a metaphor of the Underworld:
“Where else but the circus will we ever see the underworld in daylight: the tent of enclosed space, the rings, everyone as close to death as his or her art will allow, the freaks of nature that are beyond nature, and above all, the precise performances of repetitive nonsense, as if Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus had once worked for Ringling Brothers.”

“The comic spirit masquerades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do not need to put on a white face. The matter is not one of becoming a clown but of learning what he teaches: making an art of our senseless repetitions, our collapsing and our pathologizings, putting on the face of death that allows the dream world in and watching it turn ordinary objects into amazing images, our public persons into butts of laughter.”

“Unfortunately psychology emphasizes attention and recall; the dayworld wishes to have, must absolutely have, a ‘good memory’; a bad memory is more devastating to success than is a bad conscience. Forgetting therefore becomes a pathological sign. But depth psychology based on an archetypal perspective might understand forgetting as serving a deeper purpose, seeing in these holes and slips in the dayworld the means by which events are transformed out of personal life, voiding it, emptying it. Somehow we must come to better terms with Lethe, since she rules many years, especially the last years, and we would be foolish to dismiss her work only as pathological. The romantics took Lethe most seriously.”

[Forrest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly an innovative work, I could not help but think that Hillman's admixture of psychology and esotericism was often strained, or at least at odds with itself. This is what happens when one tries to wrest both psychology and mythology out of their "traditional" contexts (the ones our intellects are accustomed to) and place them in a new, unique relationship. Hillman eschews many aspects of Freudian and Jungian analysis, while embracing others (particularly the idea of "depth psychology") in his new paradigm.

My issue in trying to fit The Dream and the Underworld in my head is the habit of Hillman in seeming to reject certain aspects of the waking world in relation to the sleeping world.

What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it..

This seems intuitive, on the face of it. But later in the book, Hillman espouses the need for therapy (which inevitably takes place in the waking world) that encourages the patient to immerse themselves in their dreams and simply run with it. There's really no clinical diagnosis taking place (none that I can see, anyway) beyond just encouraging people to dream and dream deeply, rejecting any imposition of waking world ideas on the sleeping world.

There's a certain pedantism present also. For example, Hillman lists three "habits of mind that impede grasping the idea of the underworld as the psychic realm": Materialism, oppositionalism, and christianism. I see his points and at least partially understand each one, but I find it interesting that rather than explain how the underworld can be understood as the psychic realm up front, he first sets out to imply that misunderstanding such is an error in judgement. That may be true, but there is little coaching (as one should expect from a clinical therapist) on how rejecting these impediments help the patient to get any kind of resolution to their issues.

Now, I probably sound like I hated this book, but that is completely untrue. I laud Hillman for "freeing" the dreaming world from the waking world. Rather than trying to translate dreams into waking world analogues, he encourages us to dive deeper, to plumb the depths of the underworld, with the understanding that it is a dangerous, strange place, an internal hell (in the Classical Greek and Roman sense of the word, not in a Dante-ish sense) that is intentionally separate from our day-to-day experience.

I admit that after having read this, I have allowed myself to delve deeper in my dreams, to leave the workaday world behind, and have felt a fresh breeze of good mental health, as a result. Ironically, one of the dreams I have had since reading this, a darkened hell-scape in which I met three witches over a pentagram, resulted in one of the most resful nights of sleep I've had in years. There was no night terror, no fear at all, really. I felt that I was embracing the place and that these crones were more guides than guardians. I don't remember all of the details, nor do I want to. I want the incentive to return and see where things go now.

One personal note: Hillman notes that dreams and death are closely intertwined, as if dreams were a practice run for death (which is reminiscent of the argument that Brian Muraresku makes in The Immortality Key that practitioners of ancient religion may have descended into the underworld by "dying" while taking psychoactive drugs in the well-known phenomanon of "ego-death" that often occurs while tripping on a heroic dose of psilocybin, for instance). Sometime during the early stages of the Covid outbreak, before I moved to my current home, I had a profound, extremely intense dream in which I saw and spoke with my deceased maternal grandmother (another crone, perhaps?). I saw her crystal-clear, as I remember her when I was a child, but with bright light streaming from her - an angel in the darkness, you might say. We spoke briefly, and I had the most profound sense of love and gratitude that I had felt in a long, long time. The dream ended when I "burst" with love and "died". I have no other way of putting it. I exploded with love and felt it in every single atom of my body, then, I simply expired. I awoke shaking and crying (for joy, not for sorrow), but felt physically exhilirated (resurrected, perhaps?), ready to face the many changes that were taking place in my life at that time.

I was told by a friend once, who had clinically died after a stroke, then came back, that "dying was the coolest thing I've ever felt." If that's what dying feels like, I'm really not worried about it at all. In the meantime, though, I'll be satisfied to dream a little deeper. I've still got a lot of things to do in the waking world!

[Walt]

This book is typical of Hillman ideas about Jung. Hillman did not like what he called Jung's bias towards unity and wholeness. In this work Hilman makes it clear he does not want the dream brought up into daylight meaning into ego consciousness. Hillman wants the dream images left in what he calls the Underworld. Hillman preferes to leave the dream in its parts. He does not want to interpret the dream. He feels by leaving the dream in its parts and be doing so creates soul, or what he calls soul making.

Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is full of his theme of leaving the dream images as they appear without bringing the dream up into what he called the Solar Hero for understanding. In Jung's life time he warned against a more purely esthetic point of view meaning to admire the dream images without descernment and understanding. Hillman's point of view is just that. He wants to admire and to look at the dream images without getting to the meanings in the dreams.

From my point of view Archetypal Psychology can be understood as Hillman's symptom, for he was famous for fragmenting during his lectures and flying into a rage over questions put to him. At bottom, Hillman has said nothing new, but his bias toward the many against unity and wholeness showed in his life.

However, this book is worth the read for those serious about Jung to gain understanding of what the revisionists are saying.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is, frankly, bizarre, but in a beautiful, complicated, confounding rather than repelling way. I have the sense that Hillman's version of mythology is a myth spun about myths, but in a certain sense it doesn't matter whether any particular claim in this book is true or false. Through opening up new (old?) layers of depth and inviting one to view and feel things from a different perspective, Hillman's achievement is not contained within his own imagination but rather within what he inspires in the imagination of others. I'm grateful to have read this book.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is now my favorite of James Hillman's books, and the best book on dreams I have ever read. Read it; it will change your life (or at least make you feel less grumpy at work on Monday morning).

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

On a second re-reading: holds up absolutely. One of the essential books in the Jungian sphere.

Brief note before the review (see my review of The Tempest for complementary preface note). As I contemplate retirement in a couple of more years, I'm reengaging the process of engagement with my dreams that began when I encountered Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections in high school and has continued over what's now almost 35 years of (very) intermittent work with my dream guide/analyst, Dennis Merritt). Part of that will involve reading/revisiting some of the base texts of "Jungian" psychology; some of it will involve chronicling the books my dreams more or less suggest/instruct that I read.)

The Dream and the Underworld is an extremely important contribute to Jungian psychology, in ways as important as anything Jung wrote himself. I'm not positive that I agree with Hillman's reading of Jung, but that doesn't really matter; I'll leave the squabbling over dogma to the Freudians.) What is crucial is Hillman's insistence that when one approaches the bridge between "dayworld" and "nightworld," lived experience and dream, you have to understand that the street runs both ways. Especially in our therapeutical/self-help culture, the most common attitude toward dreams/analysis is that you pay attention to dreams to learn things you can apply to your waking life. As Hillman phrases it, most psychotherapists either "analyze" or "interpret" dreams. In contrast, he argues that dreams have their power precisely because that are grounded in a different (to use the Jungian term "archetypal" sphere). They manifest the actual interconnections between aspects of experience we (at least in the West) typically see as discrete spheres. The implication of his approach is that the best thing to do with dreams is not to "understand" them but to let their images and their complicated emotional/intellectual power linger, to let them, gradually and non-ideologically, shape your conscious work. It reminds me of the African-American lesbian feminist Audre Lorde's brilliant, brief essay, "The Uses of the Erotic."

If you don't have any prior knowledge of Jung, this might be a bit dense. The first several chapters bog just a bit in the inside baseball of psychoanalysis, but once he starts rolling, he rolls. For me, the chapter on "Praxis," a walk through Hillman's understanding of a set of particular images, was disposable. Like Freud and to a lesser extent Jung, his knowledge base is almost entirely Western, his mythic references Greek and Roman. But I didn't have any trouble drawing connections with African diasporic, Native American, Sami, Aboriginal, etc., analogs. Hillman's whole point about dreams is that they open us to connections rather than narrowing us to generalizations makes that feel natural.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is ostensibly the conclusion to the author's trilogy begun by "The Myth of Analysis" and "Re-Visioning Psychology", which started out as critical re-appraisals of traditional Western psychology as incepted by Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung but end up closer to New Agey mysticism in the vein of G. I. Gurdjieff, Colin Wilson and Alejandro Jodorowsky with each book.

Imagine my surprise, then, that "The Dream and the Underworld" turns out to be a straightforwards history of how dream interpretation has evolved through the history of psychology as well as the differences between the dream symbolism of different mythologies. Hillman being Hillman the bulk of the comparative mythology focuses on Greek and Roman paganism. However, he also examines the roles dreams play in the Bible - going into detail about how Judaism and Christianity treat dreams differently. Just like both Jodorowsky and Wilson, and for that matter also Friedrich Nietzsche, Hillman treats Judaism with a level of utmost respect he never affords Christianity.

The most eye-opening insight I found here myself is Hillman pointing out that in the original Greek and Roman myths, Hades/Pluto the god of death and the underworld is a stern but just authority figure who often helps the gods of the daytime world sort out their problems, a point often lost in popular culture's depictions of classical mythology where Hades is portrayed as more of a malicious or untrustworthy demonic figure. Hillman argues that this is something modern Westerners should pay more attention to, and ponder the implications hereof. I also quite enjoyed the information about the roles that tombs and monuments played in the ancient world's societies, an impressive amount of obscure information about the Greco-Roman antiquity is to be expected in any book by Hillman. And to be frank, as far as high strangeness is concerned that is positively mundane compared to the "re-invention of psychology as pagan mysticism" rabbithole the author went down in his previous book.

I have to say "The Dream and the Underworld" felt like a total anti-climax, since I kept expecting Hillman to go full Jodorowsky here but instead we only have a competent book examining dream symbolism's role in different mythologies and psychological systems of analysis. If one written in the author's trademark purple prose.

[lilly amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

you know when you’ve read books, over a period of months or years, that have distilled themselves into subliminal residues, which over time have crystallized or mineralized in disparate hidden strata throughout your mind ?

they’re there - occasionally they break free and surface - but tend to disappear again almost as soon as they appeared, as if the combinations or situations or incantations evoked them is as elusive as they themselves are.

there’s a quote i read recently that’s from andy warhol: “i never fell apart because i always fell together.” this book is for people who fall apart, clumsy awkward people, who bump into people and drop their things all the time, watching their fruit rolling beneath someone’s feet & wondering how it is people are so put-together.

words, like images, are playful, put on masks, trade roles and places - even when they’re reified as concepts or interpretations, there’s a scene being staged, acts being given or directed.

for people used to rotting, molting, becoming catatonic, withering beneath the fixity of the stage lights, the sun’s light — this is a good place to start, find your ground, catch your breath, maybe even go deeper.

tbh, i really wish i had read this book earlier in my life (would have saved me a lot stress, maybe even a few hospital visits [just kidding])

[Barbara K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd forgotten to add this until I saw it here as a recommendation.

I had a little trouble with this book when I read it. It's very good, and right down my alley, but there were some concepts that my mind for whatever reason wanted to resist, such as the idea of dreams not having any time element, or rather the interpretation not needing to address time. It's possible I misunderstood this and a lot of Hillman's other ideas. It's a thought-provoking book that I will likely reread, possibly at a time with fewer distractions, or now that I know what to expect, with less resistance on my part. I do like the whole "underworld" concept, because I know from experience it's too easy to relate a dream to outer life rather than inner life. Possibly this is because so often they're related, and we're trained from infancy that the really important events and processes are "out there."

I recommend this book not for someone new to Jungian psychology but as a possible must-read for anyone deeply interested in Jungian, or any other method, of dream interpretation or inner work.

[Johnny Cordova · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dream as a descent into the underworld and Dionysian dismemberment of the ego-self, dream work as a process of revealing and building soul, the dreamworld as a more real reality than the day world, some interesting ideas about clowns.

You'll need a good dictionary. You'll need to carefully re-read many paragraphs. It will change the way you think about dreams.

[Slap Happy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giving a bit of sacredness back to the underworld and dreams.

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

GREAT BOOK

James Hillman explores DREAMS and DREAM IMAGES and differentiates his PRAXIS of DREAM WORK from Freud/Jung.

THE UNDERWORLD

Hillman posits that the dream realm is akin to the ancient concept of the UNDERWORLD, a richly symbolic, MYTIC space where the dead reside and where the DAY-WORLD rules of TIME/SPACE/LOGIC absolutely DO NOT APLLY.

GO DOWN

Hillman suggests that understanding dreams requires a DESCENT into UNCERTAINTY and IMMERSION into the dream imagery, rather than an ACENT towards DEFINITION and CERTAINTY, or TERGID INTERPRETATION form an ALOOF critical DISTANCE.

THE IMAGE

Rather than seeing dreams as latent with SYMBOLIC content (Freud), or as populated by universally recognizable ARCHETYPES (Jung). Hillman places emphasis on the DREAM IMAGE, as it APPEARS, arguing that the IMAGE is WHAT IT IS.

For Hillman the IMAGE needs to be DIRECTLY ENCOUNTERED and IMAGINABLY ENGAGED rather than INTERPRETED or DEFINED as one ARCHETYPE or ANOTHER.

DEFINITIONS ARE A DEFENSE

For Hillman DEFINITIONS are only appropriate to (DAY-WORLD) LOGIC and POSITIVISTIC SCIENCE.

Hillman doesn’t condemn LOGIC/SCIENCE.

But rather argues that our PSYCHE doesn’t conform to the SAME logic. And argues that DAY-WORLD methods of DREAM work, and POSITIVISTIC approaches to PSYCHOLOGY and PSYCHOTHERAPY (more broadly) FAIL to enter the UNDERWORLD or the DREAM and the DEPTHS of the SOUL.

As such.

Attempts to DEFINE may function as a DEFENSE against FEELING/EXPERIENCING for both THERAPIST/PATIENT alike.

AMPLIFICATION

Hillman prefers AMPLIFICATION of the DREAM IMAGE (rather than DEFINITION/INTERPRETATION). AMPLIFICATION entails IMAGINAL ENGAGEMENT whereby the THERAPIST/PATIENT work together to connect the DREAM IMAGE to PERSONAL and ARCHETYPAL MEANING W/O compressing the IMAGE into the ARCHETYPE.

FOR INSTANCE

For Hillman.

The SANKE DREAM IMAGE is not the ARCHETYPAL SYMBOL of THIS or THAT.

A SNAKE is a SNAKE.

Compressing the SANKE DREAM IMAGE into a DEFINED ARCHETYPE is like SLAYING THE SNAKE image and STUFFING IT WITH IDEAS.

Hillman would rather ASK THE SNAKE WHO IT IS AND WHAT IT WANTS. And WAIT FOR THE SNAKE TO ANSWER. And use ARCHETYPAL knowledge as a way of AMPLIFYING all that.

Hillman asserts that AMPLIFICATION of “confronts the mind with paradoxes and tensions; it reveals complexities. It tends even to build symbols. This gets us closer to psychological truth, which always has a paradoxical unconscious aspect, than does definition with its exclusively conscious rationality.”

If you’re MERCUROUS about how to ACTUALLY apply all of this. Hillmans METHOD of dream work has a contemporary HOME in Stephen A. Aizenstat’s work on DREAM TENDING.

Great stuff 5/5

[Simão Cortês · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked this book but it took me a long time to read considering my usual reading pace. This was the third book I read on psychoanalysis and dreams. Hillman is the teacher of Bosnak, the writer that introduced me to the world of dreams, but his writing is much more hermetic than Bosnak's. Actually, you really need to be in a contemplative mood and also extremely concentrated in order to get anything of what he is saying.
Hillman had a project of revisioning psychology in general and he is both extremely appreciative as well as critical of the mythologies proposed by both Jung and Freud. I think he would identify himself mostly as Jungian, but his approach to analysis is still very different. In this book, Hillman tries to postulate the concept of a shadow that casts an ego as opposing to the idea that the ego casts a shadow. He is more interested in the concept of psyche *as* soul and not as a product of the human brain. The approach is clearly mystical and he makes this explicit when showing his appreciation of classical theology and the Orphic traditions.
Hillman's pessimist outlook on the human condition and our society is extremely alluring to me. I like his idea that everything is sick. I also enjoy his criticism of the heroic ego very much and of the psychology that tries to subdue dreams to the heroic ego. This is his main criticism of Jung's and Freud's work on dreams. Whatever differences they have in their approach, they still try to instrumentalize the dream to serve the ego's purpose. This instrumentalization is the result of our Herculean approach to our life. But our soul is not a hero, says Hillman. Our soul belongs in the underworld and our dreams are this journey to the underworld re-enacted every night. The only possible way of paying homage to them, is preserve the image but avoid interpretation at any cost. The dog that pursues you in your dream does not represent the primal or primitive side of your psyche awakening. It represents a dog pursuing you. The image is self sufficient and interpretation is mutilation.
From this point of view even Bosnak's approach is rather egoic and I understand Hillman's point, despite still being very interested in Bosnak's approach.
The only reason I'm not giving this book five stars is the chapter on Praxis. In it Hillman tries to please the reader by discussing some symbology, but since he made explicit we should avoid interpretations most of the discussion ends in "this represents the underworld". It's like reading a joke already knowing the punchline. I would have been much more interested in knowing about Hillman's *actual* practice as an analyst and how he approaches dreams in the consultations because one wonders how would such a session work if there is no interpretation. It's a pity he got lost in half accomplished interpretations when this would have been more interesting.
I am fascinated by his idea that gods and complexes are just two different mythological ways of looking at the same phenomenon. He is not saying that the gods you yesterday are today's complexes in the sense that he doesn't attribute a superior ontological value to complexes than he does to the gods. They are both mythological languages that refer to very real, even if imaginal, realities.

All things considered, it was a pretty solid read.

[Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Hillman is winding up being one of my favorite post-Jungian 'philosophers', for lack of a better term, a definition which I fully believe the man himself would chafe under.

His reworking of dream therapy invokes the classical underworld of Greco-Roman mythology, not as an interpretive symbol or force, but as literal as the 'self' in the dream, that must be taken as it is, without analysis, for any sort of eventual therapy to begin. His eventual use of the patients recognition of the dream-self is an extension of his grand work, the ability of the patient to examine (but not necessarily define) an item as slippery as quicksilver, the soul. Of course, the very definition of the soul is up for grabs, but one that is exquisitely well thought out by Mr. Hillman.

An engrossing read for anyone interested in modern psychiatry, or actual dream therapy without resorting to the new-age dingbattery offered by the airport bookstore crowd.

[xenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

clambering through the nightmare as a sensate being, fixing nothing, lurid and immense, like a radiant black hole

so much of psychotherapy instrumentalises our experiences, fixes them to meaning so that we can deploy them as tools

by seeking meaning, apertures close, doors close, eyes close, and we build a perfect house to die in called the self

but dreams exist beyond and behind the self, in the churn of the imaginal, the coupling of lived experiences with mythic vectors; vectors of lust, and great terror, and haunting, wretched grief

to interpret them by the daylight mind, would be to lacerate them

so what do they mean to the sleeper? the dreamer? the one who fills the night? what paths are laid before them? what lavish desires? what possibilities?

instead of reasoning, becoming
instead of sensibility, the sensate

because when the sun's gone, the moon will play

[Fernando Suarezserna · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most important books I've read in my life. It may sound cliché, but this is one of the few books where you know something has changed once you've read it, and there's no way to "unlearn" the new awareness you've gained thanks to Hillman.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was helpful to me for several reasons, but most notably in how it associated the Imaginal/imagistic method of Swedenborg and Henry Corbin with the dream. The dream is fundamentally image and symbol, and any attempt to literalize it through interpretation is to kill its vitality (the life hidden within death). It also helped me understand the imaginal world of dreams as something that synthesizes opposites, for in dreams an image can mean any number of things at once. I developed that same attitude in my reading of scripture, and so I can attest that it is a valid one.

I didn't like Hillman's emphasis that life requires death, and not the other way around. On the contrary, I believe (due to my religion, reading, and personal experience) that the dead strive toward embodiment just as much as we move inevitably toward the grave. Life and death need each other, and any attempt to emphasize one over the other is misguided.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting book. It was recommended in the reading I did of Bill Plotkin. I wanted something on dreaming that was neither Freudian nor Jungian. However, this author is still tied to psychology and grecoroman myth0logy. I confess some terms were like those in a philosophy text. I know what the words mean ostensibly, and yet I do not understand the sentence, and I feel the author waxing rhapsodically rather than attempting to seriously convey an approach. I do acknowledge that his approach IS that we must relate to dreams on their own terms rather than those of the ego/conscious mind. I'm good with that. But I think a case study or a little help in how to meander down that path would have been more helpful. Sigh.

[Tait · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hillman was a depth psychologist, student of Carl Jung and founder of Archetypal Psychology, and a key figure in reevaluating psychological approaches to dreamwork. This book relates dreaming back to its mythological roots and connection with the underworld or other spiritual realities. Hillman stresses the importance of experiencing dreams objectively, and takes the radical stance that rather than translating dreams into the day, we need to translate ourselves into the dream. The Dream and the Underworld was pivotal in my own work with and understanding of dreams for recognizing the need to approach dreams objectively and as a mythic reality that we enter into.

[Don Wentworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

An offshoot of 'traditional' Freudian and Jungian dream work, Hillman posits an approach to dream as image, a corollary of the myth of the Underworld (in contrast with the unconscious), not to be interpretated as symbol or archetype but as pure image.

A bit of a muddle, but a stimulating muddle, allowing the reader to see dreams, and analysis, in a different, if related light.

The extra star is for effort, acknowledging the author's willingness to expose his theories shortcomings as well as strengths.

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book on the dark shadowy dreams that we all have. Hillman stretches Jung's work (as usual) almost beyond recognition. However, it is an important book to read for anyone familiar with Jung's or Stephen Eisenstadt's work on dreams

[Violator · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some mythology mixed with Freud and Jung's ideas on dream interpretation, all brought together in a new way of looking at dreams and the underworld. Gave me a lot to think about, but then I like this kind of stuff already!

[Joli Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critical reading for depth psychologists and anyone who wants to come into a relationship with the dream world. Hillman takes the basic ideas of Jungian psychology, flips, twists, turns, and son you find you've got an entirely new perspective on what it means to be human.

[Ciro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dense and esoteric read. Understood about 10% of the subject matter. Great historical background on the many different cultures and psychologists who have studied the Dream. Overall not a book recommended for someone casually wanting to know about dreams.

[Isak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and insightful book ordered towards a poetic, imaginal, mythic view of dreaming rather than an interpretive theory. Hillman is brilliant, though his task is self-contradictory. The very act of writing a book is a dayworld activity, an act of reason, which he is anxious to persuade inheritors of Freud and Jung AGAINST applying to the dreamworld. I'm sympathetic, and reminded of common limiting approaches to poetry. I do think Hillman reveals a shallow understanding of Christianity, which he only ever calls Christianism, and I think the absence of any such "binding" and religious transcendence is at least one of the key lacunae in his work. I would love to see a Catholic or Orthodox poet/theologian/artist engage with this really unique and important book.

[Mauricio García · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

"El sueño es un mundo propio, no un problema a descifrar. Intentar traducir el sueño al mundo de día, es deshonrar al sueño".

Un gran error de los seres humanos es querer darle un significado a todos nuestros sueños o intentar decodificar sus mensajes. Esto es inútil, ya que son dos mundos diferentes y es por eso que no podemos traer los sueños al "mundo de los vivos" porque estos pertenecen a su propio mundo.
Definitivamente una lectura pesada, si no hay dominio del psicoanálisis y la mitología. Ya que el 65-70% del texto son analogías de la mitología griega y referencias a conceptos de nicho del psicoanálisis. Aun así, creo que se puede rescatar información muy valiosa e invita a hacer mucha reflexión.
El psicoanálisis no falla en ser egocéntrico, hablando en su propio idioma y mostrando cero interés en que alguien ajeno pueda comprender y adquirir este conocimiento.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find James Hillman a beautiful counterpoint to Jung’s own approach to depth psychology. Not sure how practical Hillman’s approach is within a therapeutic context but I do think it’s worth being aware of for those interested in soul-work.

He takes Jung’s ideas and flips them on their head by restoring mythology to its rightful position as soul-expanding or the food of the soul. That dreams are the soil and dung for the soul and its growth. Thus interpreting dreams carries a risk of limiting the multi-layered and open ended meanings of dreams.

“Dreaming is the psyche itself doing its soul work”-James Hillman

[Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Is it the transition to light that gives the dream its shadowy quality? We all know how much of an art it is, not to dream, but to recall it."

I haven't read nearly enough on dreams to have an informed takeaway on the theories Hillman raises in this book, I just know I'm receptive to the way he approaches the subject and am appreciative of the slant perspective he brings to discussing the dream-experience.

[viv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gave me nightmares. Literally.