A Little Course in Dreams

A Little Course in Dreams is a work by Robert Bosnak (1986).

Core claims

• Bosnak’s book is not an introduction to dream interpretation but a manual for inducing a specific shift in consciousness — from rational decoding to what he calls “image consciousness” — that treats the dream as a place to inhabit rather than a text to translate.
• The book’s circular architecture, beginning and ending with the same bulldog-and-angel figures, enacts the alchemical process it describes: the coincidentia oppositorum is not argued but performed across the reader’s own experience of the material.
• By insisting that resistance, inferiority, and confusion at the start of dreamwork are not obstacles but diagnostic instruments, Bosnak quietly overturns the competence model of clinical interpretation and aligns dreamwork with the apophatic traditions of unknowing.

Related questions

• How does Bosnak’s insistence on returning to the spatial reality of the dream challenge Hillman’s method of “seeing through” images as developed in Re-Visioning Psychology, and where do the two approaches converge on the autonomy of image?
• Bosnak frames the alchemical vas hermeticum as a relational container built through transference and disciplined attention; how does this compare with Edward Edinger’s more structural mapping of alchemical operations onto individuation stages in Anatomy of the Psyche?
• Bosnak argues that wild Mercury — the archaic destructive imagination — must be “cheated” back into the bottle through reflection rather than literal enactment; how does this formulate relate to Donald Kalsched’s account of the self-care system’s protective aggression in The Inner World of Trauma?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/bosnak-little-course-dreams/

---

This is a Tier 1 stub node, generated from the library catalog. It provides the work’s place in the graph and basic typed edges. A Tier 3 deep recon can enrich it with passage-level concept development, figure engagements, and inter-work edges.