Waking Dreams

By Mary M. Watkins

Book Overview

Mary Watkins, an imaginal psychologist, recovers the immeasurable riches of fantasy life, waking dreams, active imagination, and imaginal others, showing with lucid clarity and remarkable care the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0882143247
• ISBN13: 9780882143248
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Spring Publications
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Activate your imagination

Mary Watkins' thoroughly researched treatise examines the phenomenon of active imagination, one of the less understood of Jung's contributions to Western depth psychology. She takes us through the concepts of active imagination, explores its history both pre and post Jung, and offers considerable practical advice on using active imagination and working with the images it produces. Despite it being an uneven book in need of a second edition and a good edit (the author admits this), it is one of the few books I've read that actually makes sense of this esoteric but essential practice, which is what made me glad to have read it.

a book that takes psyche at her "word.....

...and image," this handy guide introduces the reader to the realm of the imaginal psyche, where personifications surface from the unconscious to greet and question those who show them hospitality. Without slipping into the archetypalist tendency to deify image or confuse it with archetype, the author makes good use of her wisdom and clarity to bring us a sense of dialoging with psyche's autonomous imaginal promptings. Are the figures that confront us in the "waking dream" of reverie "only" imagination? Are they really products of the conscious ego? Or are they supernatural voices, otherworldly faces? Perhaps none of these so much as charged personifications who demand to be taken seriously and loaned the respect due any form of creative sentience.It was Freud who outraged us with his psychological notion that we are not necessarily masters in our own "inner" house. Jung took this a step further by creating tools with which to engage these real figures (for the psychological is THE reality through which we engage our worlds) via dreamwork and fantasy and what he called active imagination. Dr. Watkins opens this depth-psychological tradition of inquiry into an attentive space in which individuation--or, as she likes to say, liberation--is not a colonial endeavor to conquer lost territory or dredge psychic wreckage to the surface of the mind, but a way of humbly participating as receptive partners in the delicate work of soulmaking, of befriending the Ones who inhabit the same psyche we do...a psyche not bounded by brain or body. For psyche is not in us; we are in it, and invited, should we listen with ears sensitized by Dr. Watkins' suggestions and examples, to a mutuality of enrichment in which we and the imaginal get to know one another.