Dream-ego

Hillman’s technical term for the experiencing I inside the dream — distinct from the waking ego that remembers and interprets the dream afterward. The distinction matters because dream hermeneutics collapses without it: if the waking ego is treated as continuous with the dream-ego, every image becomes a projection of the waking subject and the dream loses its alterity.

“Usually a good deal of dream analysis is required before the dream-ego begins to behave in dreams as a familiar of the underworld, keeping its laws, which differ from those of the upperworld” (Hillman 1979). The analytic work is not the waking ego’s decoding of the dream but the dream-ego’s acclimation — learning to stay in the dream, to meet the other dream figures without dissociating or fleeing. When the dream-ego flees into waking, analysis, or the “riotous Mardi Gras band” that Hillman’s case-example dreamer flees from, the dreamer is fleeing the underworld’s own pedagogy.

Bosnak extends the concept into the body. In Embodiment (2007) the dream-ego is not only an I but a tissue — the dream-I’s heart rate rises, its respiration changes, its skin prickles. Embodied imagination is, technically, the cultivated capacity of the dream-ego to sustain its dream-existence into the body of the waking work. Where Hillman held the dream-ego to its underworld, Bosnak walks it back through the threshold with its somatic register intact.

Relationships

• dream-as-underworld
• embodied-imagination
• dreamwork
• nekyia
• active-imagination

Primary sources

• hillman-dream-underworld (Hillman 1979)
• bosnak-embodiment (Bosnak 2007)