Dream persons - Hillman p.59-64

Here are notes from Hillman's section on dream persons. Please enjoy.

THE PERSONS I ENGAGE WITH IN DREAMS ARE NEITHER REPRESENTATIONS OF THEIR LIVING SELVES NOR PARTS OF MYSELF. THEY ARE SHADOW IMAGES THAT FILL ARCHETYPAL ROLES; THEY ARE MASKS, IN THE HOLLOW OF WHICH IS A NUMEN (SPIRIT)

3 approaches to dream persons
1. Freudian “Other people are essential for understanding dream persons” (takes you back to the actuality of the day)
Freud’s method of interpretation projects people in dreams back over the bridge into the dream day
2. Jungian “My personality is essential for understanding dream persons” (takes you back to subject as an expression of a person’s complexes)
Jung’s method takes the dream people into the subject of the dreamer – they become an expression of my psychic traits
In neither method do we ever truly leave the personal aspect of the dream persons- we remain engaged in the upperworld
3. Archetypal – “Only the persons of the dreams are essential for understanding the persons in the dream” (takes you back to the underworld of psychic images. They become mythic beings – not mainly by amplifying their mythic parallels but by seeing through to the imaginative persons within the personal masks)

Shadow figure or shades are not the people themselves or even the people’s essence
(older brother example – neither the actual brother nor the older, responsible traits)
Because the older brother is now a shade in the underworld, he is a purely psychic form
Teacher example in a dream is not only some intellectual potential of my psychic wholeness. More deeply, this figure is the archetypal mentor who, for now, in this dream, wears the robes of this schoolteacher or that professor.

Like in Homeric hymns, the god appears to the dreamer in the guise of a living friend.
(Egyptian) At the psychic level of existence, the essential image of our personal self, who is our shadow soul, is at the same time an image of a God.
In dreams, we are visited by nymphs, heroes and gods shapes like our friends of last evening.

The essence of the person is in the name.
One of the ways of restoring the “embracing vision of the myth” to the persons of last evening who have entered the dream is to look at their names. In their names are their souls.

Names are things in themselves – they do not represent something else where embodied by the name, but they are presentations of the mind to itself of its own presence. The name is the divine logos clothed in the person of the dream. We must find names for the figures or look more deeply into the names that are given. P.63

Embracing vision of the myth
No longer: Ego casting Shadow after it; instead, a shade literalizing an ego in front of it and behind which it can remain hidden.
Shadow figures in dreams – we should regard them LESS through their relations with the world and more as a reflection of the shades