I tried Carl Jung’s active imagination technique and it kinda worked. The fact that I was just returning to bed after an old man bathroom break probably helped.

The visions that led to Jung’s Red Book (aka Liber Novus) and ultimately informed most of his psychological theories were produced using this method, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I read that while doing active imagination, you can talk to the characters you imagine and they will reply. They did. It was brief but impactful.

Of course it’s still you – it’s imagination – but you can still learn something. It gives you a bit of access to the unconscious mind, which can in some ways be wiser than your ego, the part you think with.

It’s just that it doesn’t talk in words. It communicates through images and symbols, though it can take years to understand what they mean. Sometimes it’s good to ask your unconscious for answers.

Sometimes it solves puzzles before your thinking mind does. You just don’t always have enough pieces of the puzzle to understand what it’s saying right away.

I decided to use Jung’s technique on a nightmare that had been bothering me since my early 20s, back when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was beginning think I might not be a Baptist. I think I just figured it out.

The Nightmare: Being a demon against my will

The nightmare involved a plot to assassinate Jesus. Race also played a minor role, but I wanted to understand it. It was disturbing, but the bad dreams are usually the interesting ones.

The decades-old nightmare I chose to investigate really ate at me. I hated even thinking about it. I decided that made it a good target for Active Imagination. One of those subjects I was avoiding.

As I said in the last post, this post involves religion and race. I promise not in a mean way, though if you’re religious you may quibble. I go my own way when it comes to spirituality.

In my nightmare, I was one of the unclean spirits mentioned in Mark Chapter 5. If you went to church, you probably remember that one – it’s the “My name is Legion” story where Jesus unclean spirits out of a troubled man.

The spirits were on their way to assassinate Jesus. The man we possessed ran through tunnels and culverts, looking for Jesus as I yelled “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

I was desperate not to take part. I kept yelling, “Noooo! Noooo! Let me out of this! I love Jesus. I would never do that!”

But there was no way to stop it.

I exited a tunnel and Jesus was sitting on a log in a dry creek bed, his back turned to us. Suddenly he turned and I knew he saw me, not just any “unclean spirit,” but me.

His sad look told me he was very disappointed in me. That was more than I could take and I woke, covered in sweat. My uncle said I cried out in my sleep. It was a fear I’d picked up in church, that I might one day become irredeemably bad.

The nightmare nagged at me for decades, more than a decade as a self-proclaimed Christian. What the hell was that dream trying to tell me?

I thought I’d figured the dream out years ago, though I knew nothing about Jung at the time.

Two themes jumped out right away: The first was betrayal. I feared I was betraying Jesus, and yet I felt betrayed because he never acknowledged I didn’t have free will.

The second theme was doubt. Questioning my deeply held beliefs was frightening at times, ashamed. I’d been warned about “falling from Grace,” something I’d vowed never to do. But my doubts refused to go away, hard as I tried to push them away.

Those two themes alone explained why I would have a nightmare like that. I was going through a transition. But I still felt like I was missing something.

I decided Jung’s Active Imagination might help me find the missing pieces. I was curious as to why it kept popping into my head long after it had quit upsetting me. I’m not that person anymore. I decided to ask my dream characters some questions.

I spoke the man the “Legion” of spirits had inhabited. “Did you find it unfair when Jesus judged you?”

“He was looking at you,” the man said. As I had suspected. The dream was about me and me alone.

It also bothered me that the man in my dream was black and that he, like me, was forced to do something bad against his will, just like me. (We didn’t actually do it.)

I asked him why race had been part of my dream. “I represent unfair treatment,” he said.

That made sense.

I asked Dream Jesus why he had judged me. “You were friends with sinners and tax collectors. You accepted the thief on the cross. You knew I didn’t mean you harm.”

“I was never in your dream,” he said. “I was part of your unconscious. You were judging yourself.”

I think that solved it. There were two main themes other than betrayal and doubt. These were judgment and unfairness. Two characteristics of the faith I grew up in that always bothered me and part of why I had to change my beliefs.