Deliteralizing the dream

To deliteralize the dream is to refuse the move that comes most naturally to the waking mind: treating the dream's figures, places, and events as if they were reports about the dayworld. The mother who appears in the dream is not your mother; the house is not your house; the threat is not a threat to your body. These are images — and the distinction between image and perception is, for archetypal psychology, the hinge on which everything turns.

Berry states the premise with precision: following Jung's own definition, an image is not "the psychic reflection of an external object, but a concept derived from poetic usage, namely, a figure of fancy or fantasy-image." The imaginal and the perceptual rely on "distinctly different psychic functions," and with imagination "any question of objective referent is irrelevant." The dream borrows the faces of people we know, the shapes of rooms we have lived in — but these are afterimages pressed into service by the psyche's own opus, not dispatches from the literal world. To treat them as literal is to block what Berry calls the psyche's movement "away from the perceptual toward the imaginal," a movement she names the opus contra naturam — a work against the grain of natural perception.

Hillman extends this into a full hermeneutic. In Archetypal Psychology (1983), he defines soul-making as precisely this act of de-literalizing:

Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining that sees through an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing — that psychological attitude that suspiciously disallows the naive and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul.

The word "suspiciously" carries weight here. De-literalizing is not a gentle reframing; it is an active resistance to the pull of the obvious. The dream presents a lion in the bathroom — and the literalizing move is to ask what the lion "stands for," what biographical memory it encodes, what wish it disguises. All of these moves translate the image back into dayworld currency. De-literalizing holds the lion as lion: irreducible, structurally positioned within the dream's own grammar, carrying meaning that cannot be separated from its specific imaginal form.

This is where Hillman parts company most sharply with Freud — and, more quietly, with Jung. Freud's Traumarbeit was explicitly a mechanism of concealment; the analyst's labor was to reverse it, to undo the dream-work and recover the latent content beneath the manifest image. Hillman names this directly: interpretation "seeks to undo the dream-work," to unravel what the dream has woven. The direction of travel is against the dream. Jungian amplification improves on this by elevating the image to mythic register, but it still subordinates the dream to the waking ego's project of integration — the dream remains raw material to be worked on, not a place to inhabit on its own terms.

De-literalizing is the corrective to both. It asks not "what does this image mean?" in the sense of what concept it points toward, but "what does this image do to the soul that encounters it?" Berry's structural observation is useful here: a red bird in one dream and a red bird in another never carry the same content, because their structural positioning within the dream's field differs. The image is not a symbol floating free of context; it is "both the content of a structure and the structure of a content," irreducible to either alone.

The deeper claim — the one that makes de-literalizing more than a hermeneutic technique — is that the dream belongs to a different ontological register altogether. Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld (1979) grounds this in the Homeric nekyia: the shades of the dead are eidola, image-beings whose mode of existence is imaginal rather than vital. The dream's native country is Hades, not the dayworld. To literalize the dream is therefore not merely an interpretive error; it is a category mistake, an attempt to drag the underworld's inhabitants into the light where they dissolve. De-literalizing is the discipline of staying in the dark long enough to let the image speak in its own register.

What this means practically is a shift in the question the dreamer brings to the image. Not "what does this represent?" but "what is the soul doing here?" — and then the further, harder question: what logic of not-suffering is running beneath the dream's surface? The dream that seems to promise reunion, resolution, or ascent may be the soul's pneumatic ratio at work, the "if I am spiritual enough, I will not suffer" grammar operating even in sleep. De-literalizing the dream means de-literalizing that grammar too — holding the image without immediately converting it into a program for waking life.

  • dreamwork — the full discipline of receiving, holding, and amplifying a dream without undoing it
  • dream image — the irreducible unit of dream-work and the primary datum of archetypal practice
  • James Hillman — portrait and bibliography of the architect of archetypal psychology
  • The Dream and the Underworld — Hillman's decisive break with the compensatory model of dream interpretation

Sources Cited

  • Berry, Patricia, 1982, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account