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.