For me, images, dreams and visualisations have always felt very alive and infused with potentially rich layers of nuance and meaning. Exploring them has at times led to a feeling of things almost resolving themselves at a deeper level than everyday conscious thought processes.
My life has at times felt like facing tasks I am ill-equipped for, improvising with only flimsy resources at my disposal. A miniature goblet and scrap of string I found in my pocket while visualising a well, and how I might scoop water from it, gave this feeling a clear image that is perhaps a truer and richer representation of the feeling than just naming it in words.
There was a stage in my life when I felt a strong connection to selkies, the seal-women of Scottish myth. Perhaps partly because of my connection to the Scottish coastline, selkie stories helped me be with change and transformation, and the lines between the everyday and the pull of something vaster and wilder.
Giving space to dream images of rooms full of furniture, elevators, heaps of abandoned objects from every day life and candles burning in upstairs windows has helped me to allow in what I am not yet conscious of. Amidst unfolding experiences and relationships, dreams could help me be with questions and uncertainty in a way that thinking and reasoning couldn’t.
A large solid, opaque, angular object that I visualised in the centre of a room and that later became a Chinese camphor chest with a lock I couldn’t open, gave me a sense of an obstacle in my life that I could look at from different angles, seeing it in different contexts and taking different forms. I could revisit the image, walk around it, and observe its shift over time without having to do anything.
Carl Jung suggested that the psyche is composed of images that emerge spontaneously from the unconscious. In relation to our sense of self, he referred to “circumambulation” or moving around, as one might walk around a sacred place, slowly getting closer, arriving at a shift in awareness gradually and indirectly rather than via a direct, linear path. We can approach images like this too. Therapy can be a space to be with images and dreams. In a therapy session, we can give images that resonate with us – from dreams, waking life, myth, stories or films – space and move around them with someone at our side. We can of course look up images in dream interpretation guides (or type them into Chat GPT, which, it turns out, isn’t too bad at coming up with bullet-point suggestions of possible meanings dream images might have). Possibly this can offer ideas we haven’t thought of yet, or nudge our thinking in other directions that hadn’t occurred to us.
But this is nothing like the process that can happen in dialogue in therapy where the encouragement might be to be with what that image might bring to the surface for you, what associations come to you – perhaps from your daily context, or things you are grappling with in your life, from wider culture or stories, or your childhood. Here, the authority on the image and its potential meanings is you. This unfolding is not a bullet-point thought process but a flow of associations, perhaps more images or stories, or fragments of experience, from which strands of meaning can start to emerge, if you are willing to let them.