Hope is a surface-world category — it belongs to the person lying in the bed, not to the figures moving below. Hillman's insistence here is not rhetorical sharpness for its own sake; it is an ontological claim about where dreams actually live. The underworld is not a broken version of waking life awaiting repair. It does not issue prospects. It does not incline toward morning.

What gets violated when we carry hope into dream-interpretation is the dream itself. We arrive at the image already listening for trajectory — is this moving toward health, toward integration, toward the better outcome? — and in asking that question we have already left the underworld and are speaking from the ego's longitude, which needs progress the way a body needs oxygen. The dream does not need progress. Hillman says every dream is "a self-satisfied wish" — meaning the image is complete where it stands, not pointing elsewhere, not hungry for a future it lacks. The wish is already fulfilled in the image's mere appearance.

This is why interpretation-as-prognosis always domesticates the dream. It converts something complete into something instrumental. The discipline is to stay down — to read without the grammar of ascent that the waking mind carries like a reflex.