In The Dream and the Underworld, James Hillman sees dreams as the psyche’s work of soul-making and asks us to respect them as such:

First, we should dissociate “work” from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream, where work is an imaginative activity, a work of the imagination such as takes place in painters and writers. Not all work is done by the ego in terms of its reality principles. There is work done by the imagination in terms of its reality, where joy and fantasy also take part….Then the psyche is always at work, churning and fermenting, without forethought of its product, and there is no profit from our dreams. As long as we approach the dream to exploit it for our consciousness, to gain information from it, we are turning its workings into the economics of work. This is capitalism by the ego, now acting as a captain of industry, who by increasing his information flow is at the same time estranging himself both from the source of his raw material (nature) and his workers (imagination). Result: the usual illnesses of those at the top. Simply ‘working’ on your dreams to get information from them is no life insurance.

Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, page 118

I think here of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, where in the language of the people of Anarres there is but one word for both work and play: in a society without capitalism, all work is the work of the imagination, soul-work, the work of art and creativity that is an effort as well as a kind of joy. This is work not labor, not something to be exploited or that can be expected to deliver; it is the work of living, of making change, of being present to the world.

Hillman is here arguing for a kind of work without working, a work without output or measure or profit, a work that is its own sake in the sense of something that exists both within and outside itself, as of the dreamer and the dream. And, I think, he is letting us know that this is a work that is already within us, that we already know how to do—if only we get out of our own way.

James Hillman does not want you to interpret your dreams:

Analytical tearing apart is one thing, and conceptual interpretation another. We can have analysis without interpretation. Interpretations turn dream into its meaning. Dream is replaced with translation. But dissection cuts into the flesh and bone of the image, examining the tissue of its internal connections, and moves around among its bits, though the body of the dream is still on the table. We haven’t asked what does it mean, but who and what and how it is.

Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, page 130

That is, to interpret the dream is to exploit it, as a capitalist exploits a vein of coal, transforming those fossilized remains into a commodity, something that can be measured, evaluated, bought and sold. Hillman is demanding that you not turn the dream into something else but that you let it be what it is, that you approach it as keen and attentive observer, not trying to transform it but accepting it, acknowledging it, living with it.

(As I read this, I had a sharp image of Rowan in The Lost Steersman, dissecting the body of a creature from the outer lands, finding organs and tissues whose purpose she could not fathom but could—and did— describe in intricate detail.)

There’s an attitude here that I think can be expanded to any work in which observation, noticing, witnessing what is before us is privileged over trying to make it into something else. There is a fundamental humility to working in this way, to acknowledging that our understanding of the world around us is always incomplete. This is an incompleteness without judgment: not incomplete as inferior or flawed but incomplete as open-ended, infinite, wondrous.

We can move in this direction by means of hermeneutics, following Plato’s idea of hyponoia, “undersense,” “deeper meaning,” which is an ancient way of putting Freud’s idea of “latent.” The search for undersense is what we express in common speech as the desire to understand. We want to get below what is going on and see its basis, its fundamentals, how and where it is grounded. The need to understand more deeply, this search for deeper grounding, is like a call from Hades to move toward his deeper intelligence. All these movements of hyponoia, leading toward an understanding that gains ground and makes matter, are work.

Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, page 137

Work is the making of matter, the movement of energy from one system to another. The work of making sense, of digging for undersense, is work that matters. I take undersense to mean, in part, a kind of feeling or exploration, of reaching your hands into the dirt, of tearing apart the body of the dream with no preconceived notions of what you will find.

And not only dreams. The search for undersense is worthy also of the waking world, the world of daylight. In a world in which the creation and persistence of knowledge is threatened and fragile, we need undersense more than understanding, the exploration and observation that gains ground and makes matter. There’s an argument here for the kind of knowledge that you feel in your bones, that gets under your fingernails, that can’t be lifted away and perverted by a thieving bot. Knowledge that is steady, solid, rooted in the way roots hold tightly to the earth, defended from rain and flood, from being washed away with each passing storm.

One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the ladder, your territory across the way. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman implores us to think rather of growing down, of growth not of branch but root, of becoming more grounded, sturdier, less able to be pushed around by the whims of others. Here that notion of growth shifts our relationship to work:

As we said above concerning Hercules and as we saw above with Freud, work is usually imagined in terms of the ego and his muscles. Because Cartesian earth is still outward in visible reality, personality can only be made by a strong ego coping with tough problems in a world of hard facts. But the dream-work and the work on dreams returns work to the invisible earth, from literal reality to imaginative reality. Through dream-work we shift perspective from the heroic basis of consciousness to the poetic basis of consciousness, recognizing that every reality of whatever sort is first of all a fantasy image of the psyche. Dream-work is the locus of this interiorization of earth, effort, and ground; it is the first step in giving density, solidity, weight, gravity, seriousness, sensuousness, permanence, and depth to fantasy. We work on dreams not to strengthen the ego but to make psychic reality, to make life matter through death, to make soul by coagulating and intensifying the imagination.

It may be clearer now why I call this work soul-making rather than analysis, psychotherapy, or the process of individuation. My emphasis is upon shaping, handling, and doing something with the psychic stuff. It is a psychology of craft rather than a psychology of growth.

Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, page 137

The question I hear is, what does it mean to see our work as craft rather than as growth? What are we shaping, handling, or doing something with? The metaphor of growth is one of hunger, consumption, acquisition—to acquire more pips on your collar, more titles after your name, more people under your domain. But craft asks instead, what are you doing? What reality comes into being with your shaping and working? What is in your hands and in your heart?