Jung's ACTIVE IMAGINATION technique and Hypnagogic Imagery

Quest for Lucidity
1

This is an anecdote of personal experience in the last 40 minutes rather than a how-to. :write:

If you haven’t heard of Carl Jung’s Active imagination technique, it’s pretty much traditional meditation turned inside out. Instead of trying to empty the mind, you are ‘actively’ involved in its contents. :dark: You pull up or allow an image of a person or thing in your imagination and you speak to it. As one YouTube vid explains, empty your mind momentarily… then the first thing you ‘see’ that moves, follow it and talk to it. Active Imagination comprises so much more than that, but that’s it in a nutshell. I’m trying not to write an essay here. :write:

I lay down for a nap. I played some recordings of Tibetan gongs and singing bowls to help me from falling asleep, which I’m good at doing during midday naps. :dream:

I had a moment of my most visual and remembered Hypnagogic Imagery. While talking to an imagined character I was looking at a spot of some sort. I reached out for it with a very vivid hand and the spot became a fly that reacted and flew up and landed on my hand.

The sheer vividness of the experience jarred me out of concentration :unk: simply because I’m not used to having vivid HI outside of the movement one usually sees after just a few seconds of having their eyes closed. This was almost photographic quality.

This should be an encouragement to everyone who thinks that they don’t have the gift of vivid HI. It brings to mind what’s written in LaBerge’s EWLD: :read:

Ouspensky’s half-dream states developed out of a habit of observing the contents of his mind while falling asleep or in half-sleep after awakening from a dream. He notes that they were much easier to observe in the morning after awakening than before sleep at the beginning of the night and did not occur at all “without definite efforts.”

High-quality HI may be more of a matter of perseverance than natural talent. :hyper:

2

Intersting…

Do you think that you could post a link to that video? Or a website that explains it?

I’m actually quite interested in this. It seems like a good variation on VILD…only not :tongue:

3

Sure thing. Here’s the video I quoted from.

youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_xuwNK … re=related

Here’s a second, much shorter discussion of Active Imagination

youtube.com/watch?v=v8TU5KAjV-Q

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I think this is really interesting! :content: Do you think this could be used in combination with WILD?

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LaBerge has you visualize a lotus with a flame at the center and hang onto the image as long as possible while falling asleep…

He also has you pay attention to your hypnagogic imagery as you fall asleep to induce a WILD.

Since active imagination uses visualization, it probably could be the same thing.

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FYI I’m terrible at WILD >.<

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It takes a ton of practice. It took a year for me to be halfway decent.

I think I’ll try using active imagination in combination with WILD tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes!

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This technique kind of sounds like something i have tried a few times, although unsuccessful except for once. When i wake up in the morning and stay up for a while (1-3 hours) and then go back to sleep, it seems that the HI becomes very vivid. When this occurs, my mind is quite aware of what is happening and i can become consciously involved with this imagery. Unfortunately, the imagery will become so vivid that, like you said, i will become jarred back into the waking state. The one time i succeeded in becoming lucid,i focused intensely on the image in front and succeeded in entering a dream. I am not sure if it was a WILD but whatever it was, it seems to work for me. I also notice that while observing this imagery and i move my eyes back and forth by accident, i will yet again be jarred back RL.

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PuffyCloud I’m very interested in the results :smile:

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I almost want to post this one in my dream journal, but by the strictest definition this wasn’t a dream.

This is an Active Imagination Session I had about 20 mins. ago.
[i]

I cleared my head for about a minute and then let the scene take shape: I was in a beautiful neighborhood of tall houses and abundant greenery and flowers. There was an older gentleman in jeans, button-up shirt and a ballcap raking around several rosebushes in his yard. I came up to the fence to speak to him. The roses adopted a quality of changing colors in rapid sequence.

The man’s name was Peter Galloway. The roses had been in his family for several generations and he’s been taking care of them most of his life.

I engaged him in a conversation about lucid dreaming. A conversation too long to post in its entirety, but there was one golden moment that convinced me of the value of taking time out of the day for Active Imagination…

I told him that I felt like attempting lucid dreaming was like diving from shallow waters straight into deep, murky waters of subdued consciousness and laboring my way into the shallow waters of REM sleep, trying to hang onto the clear intention of becoming aware of the fact that I’m dreaming. Things can get dropped and lost in that span of time and exertion, you know?

He said “Well, the thoughts you have with you when you enter sleep are probably thoughts that you have with you most of the time. After all, you leave your body behind for sleep, so all you have are thoughts. Lucidity is the consequence of continuity of consciousness, not the first cause of it. There’s no getting around the fact that continuity of consciousness has to be a part of your daily routine instead of just something you do before bed.”

Toying with the scenario, and I thought I was going to fall asleep in my chair, I asked Mr. Galloway what he does before bed to induce lucid dreams.

“Well,” he said scratching an eyebrow, "I don’t expect it too hard. I expect it, but I don’t leave any room for thinking it won’t happen. It’s like my breathing. I naturally expect that I’m going to keep breathing even after I fall asleep. It never crosses my mind to doubt that. In the same way I just naturally expect that I’m going to have a lucid dream that night. I don’t expect it as if there’s a chance it won’t happen. Of course I’m going to have a lucid dream, the same way I know I’m going to breathe.

Expect it as if it were a perfectly natural process of each night. Expect it like there’s the chance it couldn’t happen, and you’re killing your odds." [/i]

There’s MUCH more, but it’s getting muddled as I try to remember it.

11

UPDATE

I’ve tried this for about four nights now (when I could) and I got nothing. I think it could potentially work, but I tend to have trouble with visualization from the start.