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Imagination has always been one of those things we take for granted, and yet it shapes nearly everything. The moment our ancestors first pictured a tool, or wondered if fire could change the taste of meat, imagination was already at work. Jung insisted it was not just daydreaming but a real bridge between our conscious plans and the hidden life of Psyche. Images, archetypes, symbols—they speak through imagination. And instead of pulling us away from reality, this function actually hands us another way of seeing it. The surprising thing is how practical this becomes. Through imagination, we discover not only where creativity begins, but also where we find our myths and our sense of who we are.
The First Great Leap
Anthropologists say there was a turning point some seventy thousand years ago, often called the “cognitive revolution.” Humans suddenly demonstrated the ability to visualize things that didn’t exist. That’s when you get the lion-man figurine carved out of mammoth ivory—half beast, half human. That is not an accident; it’s the record of a mind combining two different realities. Cooking is another example. Who first thought to hold meat over fire instead of eating it raw? Someone imagined it. The same applies to farming: someone had to envision seed and soil together in their mind before putting them together in the ground. It’s easy to forget how radical that must have been. That ability to blend and invent turned survival into culture.
Imagination as an Inner Workshop
Once imagination appeared, it became the mind’s testing ground. Hunters could run through a chase in their heads before stepping into the forest. Villagers could imagine how a rival might react before starting an argument. We still do this, almost every day, whether we’re picturing how to talk to a boss or how to handle a family dispute. These small rehearsals may not seem like much, but they are survival skills dressed up as social thinking. They let us plan, delay impulses, and measure consequences without paying the price of failure. In this sense, imagination serves as both rehearsal and protection.
Two Modes of Imagining
Imagination comes in two flavors. We usually think of imagination as something we aim at on purpose—picturing the beach before booking a trip, or a kid psyching themselves up before a ball game. But there’s also the kind that sneaks in without permission. Dreams tumble in while we sleep, or odd little images float past when we’re half-awake and not really steering anything. Now and then, an image will come unannounced, carrying a weight that feels foreign, almost like it belongs to someone else. Jung had a term for this—fantasy thinking—though he never treated it as trivial. He leaned in, even when what appeared was confusing or a little unsettling. To him, those moments were not background noise but hints that another layer of Psyche was pressing forward, asking to be noticed. It isn’t the same as the imagination we steer on purpose—like rehearsing a speech or picturing a vacation—but it has its own value. The deliberate kind lets us aim; the spontaneous kind drops something unexpected in our lap. Both shape us, though in very different ways. Together, they help maintain a balanced and growing Psyche.
Crossing into the Unconscious
For Jung, the real value of imagination was in its ability to build a bridge. Dreams, images, and fantasies carry material from the unconscious into view. By shaping those images through drawing, acting, or dialogue, we create a way for the ego to meet what would otherwise stay buried. This can be uncomfortable, because the figures that rise up are not always pleasant. But once they have a face or a voice, they can be engaged instead of ignored. That’s the real function of imagination in analysis: it turns what is hidden into something we can work with.
The Imaginal World
Henri Corbin, a French philosopher, introduced the term “mundus imaginalis“—the imaginal world. He wanted a word that didn’t dismiss imagination as “just imaginary.” This realm is not fantasy in the shallow sense. Think of it less as make-believe and more as a territory that only opens if we approach it with imagination. Jung treated it like a landscape you could actually walk in, and his Red Book is filled with the record of those wanderings—conversations with figures like Philemon and Salome that startled him with knowledge he hadn’t known he carried. When you read those passages, they don’t feel invented; they feel reported, as though he had stumbled into a strange country and come back with field notes. Storytellers such as Tolkien drew from the same well, shaping worlds so textured that they press against the edge of reality instead of floating off as simple allegory. The imaginal is where archetypes take shape and speak.
Practicing Active Imagination
Jung eventually turned imagination into a discipline. He would hold a dream image in mind and let it develop on its own. Out of this came dramas, dialogues, and visions that filled the Red Book and shaped his later theories. He referred to this practice as “active imagination.” It’s not playacting, and it’s not planning. It is holding still and letting the image move on its own. Patients who practice it often discover material that is wiser and deeper than anything the ego could supply. The practice proves that the unconscious is not empty—it is a partner.
Imagination and Creativity
Imagination also drives creation in the ordinary sense. It links unrelated fragments and turns them into something new. Old creation stories often describe beginnings with strange images: an incredible egg cracking open, or a bird diving down into dark water and surfacing with a beak full of mud. They’re not logical accounts, but they capture the sense that something new arrives out of nowhere. That same suddenness also appears in modern life. J.K. Rowling has said the idea for Harry Potter came to her while sitting on a train—one moment she was staring out the window, the next she was watching a boy with messy hair head off to wizard school. She didn’t plan it; she just received it, and from that odd flash, books, films, theme parks, and a worldwide myth emerged. The scale may differ, but the mechanism is the same for all of us. Something appears unbidden, and if we follow it, new life begins.
Imagination as Healing
Imagination doesn’t only build worlds; it helps repair them. One of the quiet yet powerful aspects of imagination is its ability to heal. Children know this instinctively: they turn fears into games, monsters into costumes, nightmares into stories. Adults do something similar in therapy when they sketch a dream or act out a troubling scene. By shaping pain into an image, it stops being an unnamable weight and becomes something you can face. Jung noticed this again and again. He believed that Psyche itself leans toward healing by providing us with images to work with. Imagination won’t take pain away, but it can change the way we carry it. When a bad dream or a heavy feeling takes the shape of an image, it changes the way we meet it. It isn’t just an ache floating around anymore; it looks like something we can point to, even if the picture is strange or frightening. Jung kept noticing that once a feeling shows up this way, it’s no longer a fog pressing in from all sides. It becomes more like a figure that stands in front of you, and you can circle it, argue with it, or even ask it questions. The pain doesn’t vanish, but it stops being formless, and that shift alone can move the whole experience in a new direction. That small change—finding form where before there was only weight—often alters the entire course of how someone lives with their grief. Imagination does not erase suffering, but it makes it meaningful, and that shift is usually enough to change a life.
Freedom in the Imaginal Stream
Even in the harshest circumstances, imagination provides inner freedom. Prisoners have survived by building entire inner landscapes. Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful portrays a father who convinces his child that their time in a camp is part of a game. The outer world did not change, but the boy’s inner world did—and that was enough to protect him. Jung would say that this is imagination at its highest: a stream that connects us to archetypal life and gives us dignity even when the outer world strips it away. To live with imagination is to know that our story is part of a much older one. That knowledge is its own liberation.
HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE:
It’s evening and I’m in a bar with high ceilings and glass walls. I’m here to meet a music lawyer named Sarah. She’s wearing a pink blouse and has long brown hair and glasses. We start on the top level of the bar on an outdoor balcony. I’m holding a black and white electric guitar. My usual guitar in real life is all white. I asked Sarah if she had heard this one, and then I proceeded to play one of my older songs that I don’t normally play. It feels a little risky. It’s an emotional song. In the lyrics, I’m metaphorically a bird soaring high, flying away to somewhere better. Happily, she likes it, as do the people on the patio. We go inside and descend to the main level. She tells me what we need to do to progress with my music career. It’s all very practical. She uses phrases like market exposure and has some gigs she’s going to set me up with. She is calm and friendly, and I innately trust her. She seems very well-connected and knowledgeable. Finally, we descend to the lowest level, which is underground. As we do, I ask her if she knows about my past. I describe the brief success I had when I was young. She listens, then says, Okay, and asks, ” Why were you successful then? Because you had a deal, the right market strategy, et cetera, and that’s what we’ll do now. Then I woke up.
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