Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth (Revised)

This is the book I've been looking for all my life! I've always loved the idea of deciphering my dreams, but dream dictionaries and other dream manuals always fell short of the mark. Well, no longer! It takes some work, but if you're willing to put in the work, you'll suddenly realise that your dreams are a lot more relevant that you might give them credit for, and it's not the woo woo thing that everyone seems to agree on. Dreams offer us pure unconscious material filled with symbology, which this book helps us to not only decipher, but to integrate said material and resolve ongoing issues that may have plagued us for years. It feels like a light has been switched on, as I now have direct access to my own inner wisdom, in a way that is far more objective than I ever thought possible.

Extremely simple breakdown of the concepts and method of Active Imagination and Dream Analysis. Highly recommended both for beginners and for hammering home in a simple manner the ideas and details that you'll find and may have missed in Jung's own works.

this is a great book for those looking to learn more about Active imagination and understanding the dream symbolism process.. I have already benefitted from this book, actually bought 2 and working with the ideas from this book with my friend. Dream analysis is vital to our growth and inner world allowing us to understand about the archetypes that exist in us and that visit us in our dreams. To now recognise them and communicate with them via active imagination will open up personal and creative dialogue when before was blocked. This will allow us to integrate and just have a better understanding of our unconscious thus creating a conversation within ourselves.

I've been writing my dreams for a long time and crudely tried to interpret them with simple associations alone with little success. Since getting this book I've interpreted 2 correctly and it's hard to describe the strange positive feeling that you get inside when it just clicks, you know? The closest word I've come to describing it with is "resolution". Active imagination is also a very multifaceted, useful tool, and good for some real direct work on the self. I struggle a bit with it since I'm a control freak but I think in the long run it will also provide me with some excellent "resolution", and integration. I'm a therapist and if I can find a way to introduce dreamwork with my clients without seeming quacky I think this will yield some great results. However, the book is by and large in laymans terms and so this can be used as a self-help book as opposed to a psychological textbook.

This guy knows his stuff, and is backed up by thousands of years of human experience, alongside Carl Jungs more extensive modern extensive research into dream archetypes etc. What Mr. Johnson does well is : be personable, phrase it for the modern mind , remove any new age flakyness, and more importantly, make it accessible. It's not the key to all things ever (there isnt one) and is not supposed to be in competition with science or medicine, it is just obvious that people should work with their base brain, as that is clearly the root and primary source of one's inner workings and this allows people to think for themselves, about themselves.. .Whether its scientifically provable is an irrelevant question - the concepts explained just work.

Teaches a digestible analysis of Jung’s Archetypes as well as approaches to dreams in order for self improvement. Pair it with the Authors other book about the Shadow, and you’ll have a good time.

I have learned a lot from this book and I use the Johnson's techniques when I work with my clients. Another piece of work to be added to the collection of the most important publications about the dream work

First session of dream analysis and ritual showed very quick results of inner healing and integration with unconscious energies ( my second dream the following morning displayed a situation of resolution and peace). Massive insights into self and the collective unconscious. Easy to understand and a commitment to inner work has been realised due to reading this book. Highly recommended.

Gives lots of tools to work on yourself. His explanations cleared out a lot of my doubts about practicing active imagination.

A fascinating, beautifully simply and directly written book on how we can relate to our subconscious thought dreams, and active imagination.

Looking into "how to" do shadow work on oneself, i came across this book as a recommendation. This book turned out to be so much more than that. The techniques can be practically used by anyone trying to look within for answers. Be it to spiritual question or a practical day to day problem. I literally "devoured" a book after a long time. It was an eye opening experience. As an attempt to lucid dream, i started taking notes of my dreams since the last few days. The idea was to bring the dreams to a "conscious" level. The notes stayed there in the journal without me doing anything with them. While reading the book, i picked a particularly bizzare one and used the techniques to try to analyse it. Before i was finished however, i realised the not so bizzare ones had equally profound messages for me. I couldnt have imagined anything equally or more profound than my meditation practice in bringing me closer to conscoius awareness. This book changed that for me. Although my meditation practice has brought a sense of wholeness over the past few years, i realised it left some parts of my "being" undernourished. It gave me the insight into why after years of trying to calm my mind and having made significant progress, why sometimes parts of me come up which i can barely recognize about myself. I have not read any other book on dream analysis or active imagination before this one so I am not in a position to compare. However, after reading several books and spending plenty of time on self development, i feel this book will always be one of the few that hold a potential to bring an actual change in my life. I recommed it to anyone who seeks answers and realises that the only place where they can be sought is "inside" oneself.

Excellent introductory book to (unsupervised) Jungian dream analysis and active imagination for beginners. The author gives an approachable overview of such necessary jungian terms as unconscious, archetypes, symbols, ego, consciousness and individuation and how their interplay in dream and active imagination images, when properly understood and directly related to our everyday life through ritual (the translating of spirit into matter or of intellectual understanding into physical reality), they contribute to a deepening and widening of our consciousness and goad us steadily on the journey to individuation. This does not claim to be the ultimate book on dream analysis because there simply cannot be such a book. When it comes to inner work one can only get so much from books the most valuable contribution being one's lifelong commitment to the painstaking journey itself. I heartily recommend this book

I found the book very helpful in explaining inner work in a way that made it easy to start practicing myself. It is also decently concise and focused. An easy recomendation for anyone looking to start dream work and or active imagination.