By locating the dream among these impalpable fundamen-tals in Hades, we will begin to find that dreams reflect an underworld of essences rather than an underground of root and seed. They present images of being rather than of becom-ing. We will learn that a dream is less a comment on life PSYCHE 41 and an indication as to where it is growing, than it is a statement from the chthonic depths, the cold, dense, unchanging state-what we so often today call psychopathic because, as Freud saw, the dream does not show morality, human feelings, or the sense of time. We can no longer turn to the dream in hopes of progress, transformation, and rebirth. I think too that the underworld teaches us to abandon our hopes for achieving unification of personality by means of the dream. The underworld spirits are plural. So much is this the case that the di manes (underworld spirits), who were the Roman equivalent of the Greek theoi chthonioi, have no native singular form. Even individual dead persons were spoken of plurally, as di manes}1 "The ancient Egyptian was thought to live after death in a multiplicity of forms, each of these forms was the full man himself" (Ba, p. 113). The underworld is an innumerable community of figures. The endless variety of figures reflects the endlessness of the soul, and dreams restore to consciousness this sense of mul-tiplicity. The polytheistic perspective is grounded in the chthonic depths of the soul.
— James Hillman
Hillman is dismantling something we bring to the dream every time we open a notebook: the quiet assumption that the night's images exist to move us somewhere. Progress, transformation, rebirth — these are the dream read through the logic of becoming, the soul pressed into service as a self-improvement engine. What Hillman points at instead is a domain that does not participate in that economy at all. The underworld is cold, dense, unchanging — its grammar is being, not becoming, and that very quality is what got it labeled psychopathic, because a psyche indifferent to time and moral progress looks broken from inside the world that prizes both.
The linguistic detail about *di manes* is not decorative. Latin refused to give the underworld spirits a singular because singularity — unified personality, an integrated self arriving at wholeness — is a fiction of the upper world. The Egyptian material extends the point: the dead man is not one but multiple, each form the full man, none of them provisional. Depth does not resolve into unity; it ramifies. What dreams return to us, then, is not a foothold on the ladder but a reminder that the soul was never one to begin with — and that what we call pathology may simply be plurality refusing to be administered.
James Hillman·The Dream and the Underworld·1979