ABSTRACT
This chapter opens our creativity through a play of identity and difference of dream-ego and waking-ego. It phenomenologically differentiates the two and enters the dream-ego’s experience of the dream, a distinctly Jungian act of imaginal empathy that transforms the waking-ego’s relationship to the source of dreams and creativity. Empathizing with the dream-ego as an image among images deliteralizes the waking-ego’s artifice of separation, opens it to the multiplicity of psyche from which it arises and in which it dwells as kin and situates it in an imaginal landscape. For the dream-ego the imaginal is real. The reality of the imaginal is the beginning of creativity, for it incites the waking-ego to incarnate the creative impulse. In the created work the imaginal is real.
And as the dream-ego is a figure among co-constituted images, our gut, our emotions, our actions and even who we imagine ourselves to be in the work are figured by the creative impulse. As the dream-ego is an image integral to the dream, our figural identity in the work is integral to the work. The dream-ego is our entry into the dream; for others, our figural identity is their entry into the created work.
