ABSTRACT
This chapter looks to a Jungian understanding and approach to dreams, as exemplified in Patricia Berry’s essay “An Approach to the Dream” for an empathic mode of engaging the source of dreams and creativity. The dream takes the literal metaphorically. Imitating this fosters a generative relationship with creativity’s source. The dream’s images are kinesthetic, sensual, emotional and textural. The role of immersive bodily engagement in creative work is explored. The dream’s images are simultaneous, intrarelated, each co-constituting the rest and their context, form and meaning are inseparable. The implications of these are explored in depth, including the complex interconnectivity that holds together the dream and creative work.
This chapter explores the relational metaphors of empathy, personhood, intent and collaboration. Empathy is a mode of engagement with creativity’s source that begins with personification and opens to the intentions of psyche’s images and the possibility of creating with collaborative intent. The dream-work techniques of amplification, elaboration, attending repeated motifs and restatement, grounded in collaborative intent, are applied to the creative process.
And given that the image exceeds language, the mystic’s stance toward the divine is explored as a model for relating to the source. The link between creation destruction is explored.
