Escape from the Poop Palace: or, Active Imagination and (fictional) character development

It baffles many people at first to hear that the imagination is an organ of coherent communication, that it employs a highly refined, complex language of symbols to express the contents of the unconscious. Yet, it is true: If we learn to watch it with a practiced eye, we discover that the imagination is a veritable stream of energy and meaningful imagery flowing from the unconscious most of the time.

—Robert A. Johnson

A screenshot from the Active Imagination video I made for Private Writing Level 2. My niece's toy cars were the perfect visual aid. (I won't elaborate here out of consideration for those lovely folks who paid for the course, though on the other hand, it’s no longer available! So if you are curious, leave a comment and I can email you a link to the video in question.)

In the midst of that period-we-are-not-calling-“writer’s-block,” I would dream of clogged toilets at least once a week. I was moving through a rundown hostel-type place, with lofty ceilings and faded peeling wallpaper that had once been ornate. Nature was calling but when I got to the ladies’ room I found all the stall doors missing and every single toilet bowl piled high with feces—that is to say, the piles were taller than the seats. People came in and out and nobody else seemed to be upset by this, they’d just climb onto the toilet seat and drop another deposit in full view of everyone else. Somebody hadn’t flushed, the person after them hadn’t flushed, and so on until no one with any regard for hygiene could have used them.

I hurried up and down the corridors of this once-grand (Nouveau?) hotel looking for a janitor, but nobody seemed to be employed here. I wanted to howl out loud in frustration and disgust.

The first time I dreamed this scene I was shocked by the vividness and specificity of it—although there is generally no, ahem, olfactory data to be had in dreams, thank goodness!—but on subsequent dreamings I’d resurface thinking, “Ugh, not again!” 

This was not an ordinary dream, in which most of the elements are vague, disjointed, and forgettable (possibly serving as “memory consolidation” and so forth). One of Carl Jung’s often-referenced concepts is that of the Big Dream—expressive of “eternal human problems” while also offering way-markers for individual growth—and that we might get to experience five such dreams in a lifetime. That may not sound like a lot, but the idea is that they’re rich enough with unconscious material that it will take years to unpack each one and integrate the lessons into your waking life. Jung’s method for achieving this work is called Active Imagination.

I first learned about Active Imagination in Robert A. Johnson’s Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth, which is one of the few HarperCollins free bookshelf finds that will remain in my home library to the very end:

Essentially, Active Imagination is a dialogue that you enter into with the different parts of yourself that live in the unconscious. In some ways it is similar to dreaming, except that you are fully awake and conscious during the experience…

In your imagination you begin to talk to your images and interact with them. They answer back. You are startled to find out that they express radically different viewpoints from those of your conscious mind. They tell you things you never consciously knew and express thoughts that you never consciously thought.

Most people do a fair amount of talking in their Active Imagination, exchanging points of view with the inner figures, trying to work out a middle ground between opposing views, even asking for advice from some very wise ones who live in the unconscious.

Johnson goes on to define active imagination as opposed to passive fantasy:

Passive fantasy is daydreaming: It is sitting and merely watching the stream of fantasy that goes on in the back of your mind as though you were at a movie. In passive fantasy you do not consciously participate; you do not reflect on what is happening; and you do not take an independent, ethical position regarding what is going on.

Of course I’m always looking for juicy case studies in my ongoing reading on the subject: how Jung developed the method as he sought to recover (psychologically and intellectually) from his break with Freud makes for compelling reading in and of itself; Johnson draws on several clients’ inner quest narratives, which tend to be rich with mythological and fairy-tale tropes and archetypes; a client of Jung’s, an artist in his twenties, who “entered” a bucolic scene on a travel poster he’d been seeing every day at the railway station (Jung mentions this one in his Tavistock Lectures, excerpts of which are included in Jung on Active Imagination, edited by Joan Chodorow); and my favorite, This Jungian Life podcast co-host Joseph Lee using the method to make sense of a recurring dream in which a shadowy figure breaks into his home and enters his bedroom. (I don’t want to spoil it for you, so here’s the podcast link; Lee’s anecdote begins at the 14:10 mark.)

Writing is the customary option, but you could also express the content of these dialogues through drawing, music, or dance. Using active imagination in my private writing practice, I’ve been able to get behind and underneath some of the most compelling images I’ve experienced in dreams, both in the Towering Poo-Piles Amid Much-Decayed Grandeur and another Big Dream I explored in the Active Imagination video in my (now-defunct) Teachable course called the Power of Private Writing, level 2. (Level 1 is free with email opt-in, and if you’ve watched that and want more, let me know.) My modest experience with Active Imagination has been extraordinarily helpful, particularly when crossed with the parts work of Internal Family Systems (but that’s a topic for another post).

Recently I thought, why not turn this method to character development, since every character a writer creates is (arguably) a facet of their own unconscious anyway? But my first attempt at active imagination-style dialogue with one of my characters was not what I’d call fruitful. It was like wandering around a bus depot, finding a fellow traveler who looked like they’d have a few stories to tell, plopping myself down on the bench beside them and striking up a conversation, only to find that they had nothing to say.

But that does tend to happen, doesn’t it, when one is put on the spot? Reading it over at a later date, I could see the dialogue resembled a job interview. My conscious mind hadn’t yielded control—and, crucially, I had not used dream material for my starting point!—so it wasn’t active imagination at all. As Mary K. Greer points out in a blog post comparing tarot and Jungian psychology, “Active Imagination is goal-less! But not purpose-less.” Once you’ve chosen your inciting image, you do your best to empty your mind, and then record whatever happens in your mental theater as faithfully as you can.

Let us now circle back to the Poop Palace. As Barbara Hannah writes in Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as developed by C.G. Jung, “[D]reams of feces and lavatories are very common and often refer to creative material that has not been properly realized.” The dream and this interpretation of it may be obvious, but don’t we sometimes need to be told what we already know in order to integrate it?

So I began with the image of the obscenely, absurdly clogged toilet. The hero of my time-travel novel is called Patrick (yes, that Patrick), and as I opened my journal I thought to myself, I’d love an extra pair of hands, but only if you feel like it. Here’s what came out:

“Can I help?”

I look up and find Pat in the doorway wearing a pair of his dad’s coveralls. A plunger materializes in his hand and he regards it with a rueful smile. “Doesn’t look like this is going to cut it.”

I feel warm with gratitude. He doesn’t owe me anything and yet he wants to help me. “Do you think any of this is worth saving?” I gesture to the peeling wallpaper, the tall grimy windows with several cracked panes. 

“Imagine writing a story about a guy who burns his house down because he can’t unclog his toilet!” Pat lets out a belly laugh and I laugh too. “Seriously though. That’s very American of you.”

I laugh again. Two slim shovels and a large metal bucket have appeared on the floor, propped against the wall by the sinks. I grab one for myself, hand him the other, and we reluctantly get down to business (heh). “What I really want to know is, who kept on shitting in these toilets?”

Pat is taken aback (and looks a little concerned). “You did.”

“I did not!”

He shrugs as he drops another shovelful into the bucket. “You’re the boss. Believe what you like.”

For a minute or two we shovel in silence. Somehow the bucket isn’t getting full. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m here to talk to you about what you REALLY want, and I start out by contradicting you. Not a good look, eh?”

“I’m working on not taking these things so personally,” he replies, sliding me that sly trickstery half-grin. “All right, let’s see if we can flush.” He pulls the chain on the toilet he’s just cleared out, and what’s left in the bowl disappears. It’s not “clean” (yet), but it’s functional. “Well, how about that,” he says. “Didn’t even need the plunger!”

“Thank you, Pat.”

“Anytime.”

“How else can I thank you?”

“I could go for a gin and tonic.” He twinkles at me as we wash our hands side by side. “Just need a shower first.”

As a dialogue it is very simple and tentative, but get this: I needed my character to clue me in that everyone else using those clogged toilets with apparent unconcern?, oh, and the absent janitor?, all of these figures were ME. This was a situation I actually had total control over. I’m at midlife now, far enough along in my career that many of the habits and attitudes I developed as a 23-year-old writer are no longer serving me. My therapist’s feedback on how I express myself and my desires for my work (professional and “hobbyist” endeavors both) has allowed me to practice greater self-compassion around how challenging it’s always been to “manage” my creativity. Because there is always more material coming through, it feels close to impossible to keep on top of it; hence the dream. But there is nothing wrong with the plumbing.

And what did I learn about my protagonist? Most importantly, that he is a lot more pragmatic than I have so far given him credit for. As I’ve plotted (and replotted) this novel, I’ve continually defaulted to a warmer iteration of the absent-minded professor—the hot-mess misfit genius—and I realized I needed to call myself on my own laziness. Also, I had envisioned Pat surrounded by loyal friends who occasionally have to talk him down from the ledge, but he is a reliable friend too, and I have to get this reciprocity down on the page. I wanted to write a hero who is both exuberant and anxious, and whose anxiety doesn’t ultimately hinder his readiness to Get Shit Done. (Or undone, as the case may be.) Working through the dream was just as empowering for him as it was for me.

The final step in the Active Imagination process is concretization: finding some way of integrating the lesson into one’s ordinary life. The interesting thing about doing this inner work in the context of fictional character development is that the novel revision is the concretization. If that sounds a little too convenient, bear in mind that we’re talking about a 534-page time-travel epic that’s taken me almost twenty years to finish. Nothing about this project was neat and tidy! Also, as pedestrian as this is inevitably going to sound: I make sure to flush the toilet every single time I use it. That is concretization too.

It’s been almost three years since I wrote the dialogue I shared above, and I haven’t dreamed of the Poop Palace again. I ought to confess, though, that this blog post has been sitting (95% finished) in my drafts folder since before I since I started my master’s in social work. Over the past year, my understanding of psychoanalysis (its limitations, its problematic underpinnings) has become a good deal more nuanced (HA.) I’m looking forward to diving into a critical discussion at some point, most likely in the form of a book appreciation for From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures by Lara Sheehi.

P.S. The International Rescue Committee is the humanitarian aid organization to which I contribute on a monthly basis. Here’s a link so you can click through and donate if you feel so inclined.