Opening to the Imaginal: Waking Dreams and Invisible Guests (Mary Watkins, James Hillman and C.G. Jung): Waking Dreams and Invisible Guests (Mary . curated by Stefano Carpani, Band 1)

Opening to the Imaginal
Waking Dreams and Invisible Guests (Mary Watkins, James Hillman and C.G. Jung)

“Waking Dreams”: One can say that this book started with a nightmare and a waking dream on two consecutive nights in January 1971. The first night I awoke seeing only the color red ... blood. The next day at dawn I awoke hearing a voice repeat over and over again "To love is to listen; to listen is to love." The voice did not speak inside my mind, it came from beyond the window, flowing into my bedroom just as dawn poured in, saturating the space with light and words in a most uncanny way. You can well imagine both how awed I was by these words and how disturbed I was that the prescribed spatial boundaries of our modern experiencing of the imaginal had been ruptured. I was twenty at the time and, though a student of psychology, I did not know what to make of these two very different visitations-from the rapist and the godlike voice. But whatever age one is, the epiphany of the imaginal world-its landscapes and characters- is unsettling, often deeply disturbing. Part of the disorientation one feels is native to the encounter with this other world. For those of us, however, who are surrounded by science, the reverence for reason and the belief in the materially and perceptually real leave us impoverished, in knowing how to entertain imaginal. We lack all the wisdom intrinsic to cultures that place imaginary experiences within the religious, poetic, and mythic orientation. This book is an effort to understand these “waking dreams” better.

“Invisible Guests”: We may find ourselves speaking with our reflection in the mirror, with the photograph of someone we miss, with a figure from a dream or a movie, with our dog. And even when we are outwardly silent, within the ebb and flux of our thought, we talk with critics, with our mothers, our god(s), our consciences; indeed we do so just as steadily as we once spoke to our dolls, our imaginary companions, the people of our painted pictures. We may find ourselves as audience or as narrator to conversations among imaginal others others not physically present but actually experienced nonetheless. These imaginal dialogues, their functions and lines of development, are the theme of this book.

Mary Watkins’ works, “Waking Dreams” and “Invisible Guests,” were initially published as standalone books in 1976 and 1986. The skeleton of Waking Dreams was initially developed as Watkins’ thesis at Princeton University and later revised while studying at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Invisible Guests is the result of many additions and changes from Watkins’ doctoral dissertation. Both books have evolved into classics for individuals delving into the realms of depth psychology. Mary Watkins has accepted the invitation to republish these two seminal works together in the series entitled Re-Covered Classics in Analytical Psychology. The combined edition is aptly titled Opening to the Imaginal: Waking Dreams and Invisible Guests.

Mary Watkins, Ph.D., Professor Emerita at Pacifica Graduate Institute, co-founded its M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program, the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies Specialization, and the Community and Ecological Fieldwork and Research curriculum. She is the author of Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues; co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Talking with Young Children About Adoption, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, and a co-editor of “Psychology and the Promotion of Peace” (Journal of Social Issues, 44, 2). She works critically at the interfaces between Euro-American depth psychologies and psychologies of liberation.