Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'
b'
In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nightworld" of dream should not play second fiddle to the "dayworld" of waking life, because in the soul as on earth, day and night are equally essential, and equally real. To reduce a dream to a message or interpretation is to fail the dream. In order for dreams to do their work on us, says Hillman, we must cease to regard them as hallucinations, mere metaphors, epiphenomena, or illusions, and instead see them as the imaginal other life we all must live. Every night, for Hillman, each of us descends into the underworld to encounter those forces that shape us and our surroundings. The way down is the way up.
\\n\\nREFERENCES
\\n\\nJames Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
\\nT. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
\\nWalter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
\\nGeorge Steiner, Real Presences
\\nHakim Bey, Orgies of the Hemp Eaters: Cuisine, Slang, Literature and Ritual of Cannabis Culture
\\nErik Davis, High Strangeness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
\\nBrad Warner on drugs and Buddhism
\\nAldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
\\nJonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
\\nChristopher Nolan (dir.), Inception
\\nJorge Luis Borges, "Nightmares" in Seven Nights
\\nHenri Bergson, Dreams