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.