Imaginal Reality names the ontological claim, central to archetypal and depth psychology, that the image possesses genuine being — neither reducible to subjective fantasy nor identical with sensory fact. The term’s philosophical pedigree runs from Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, that intermediate world mediating intellect and sense in Sufi theosophy, through James Hillman’s re-grounding of psychology on the autonomous life of images, to Robert Romanyshyn’s hermeneutic insistence that soul occupies a third, intermediate domain between matter and mind. Corbin’s decisive contribution was the sharp distinction between imaginatio vera — creative, ontologically efficacious imagination — and mere fantasy, a distinction Hillman appropriated as the charter of archetypal psychology. The corpus records significant tensions on this ground: Hillman affirms the pathologized, the monstrous, and the polytheistic as legitimate expressions of imaginal reality, diverging from Corbin’s hieratic model; Wolfgang Giegerich, by contrast, mounts a sustained critique, arguing that the imaginal mode perpetuates an ontological naivety — a duplicity of positing beings as real while simultaneously retracting that positing — and that soul’s actual life is ‘other than imaginal,’ demanding sublation into dialectical thought. Andrew Samuels extends the concept interpersonally, proposing a two-person mundus imaginalis. Practitioners such as Romanyshyn and Tozzi translate imaginal reality into methodological procedures — reverie, transference dialogue, active imagination — through which research itself becomes an imaginal practice.