Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday LifeIn a waking dream, we inhabit the dream

Introduction We need a therapy of imagination, one that respects it not as a means toward cognitive understanding but as valuable in its own right.

—Steven K. Levine1 Our approach to the imaging is predetermined by our idea of it.

—James Hillman2 To read a book on imagination can be a risky endeavour. If the aim is to have a more imaginative life, as it is in this book, caution needs to be taken.

There is no shortage, in these rational-minded times, of books that purport to explain what images mean—texts that translate memories, dreams and fantasies into symbolic representations of inner psychodynamics, the narrative templates of Greek myths, and the internalization of childhood history; maps of imagination, developmental pathways, escape routes from nightmares and anxieties. All of which is fine, so far as it goes.

There is a time and a place for analytical thinking. It allows us to step back and gain perspective, but it is not to be mistaken for living an imaginative life. The map is not the territory, as the saying goes.

In the same way that reading about expeditions across the polar ice caps is an armchair exploration from the safety and comfort of home, so too are clever explanations and theories about images not to be confused with the up-close, imaginative participation of story and dream. However, much of the psychological literature is decidedly unclear on this distinction between thinking and imagining; a muddled approach that assumes imagination to be an elaborate puzzle, images as ideas.

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