Even the language we use for this stuff begs us to privilege the visual. The literature talks about “visions” and “images,” even while noting that the experience itself was multi-sensory and often beyond simple senses.

Before I was born, the Jungians had set a norm of referring to these inner impressions and multi-sensory experiences as “images,” so I’m going to stick with that for the sake of consistency — but I do want to insist and re-iterate that whenever I use words like “image” or “vision” or “scene,” what we’re talking about is much more than just visuals.

The experiences we work with in “image return” include visual, audible, kinesthetic, spatial, narrative, emotional, somatic, intuitive, interoceptive, and other faculties. It’s the same way that when describing a dream, we often default to the visual and narrative content — but in the dream itself, there are all sorts of other emotional and sense impressions, atmospheres that convey things to us the normal senses don’t.

So as we move into these practices, keep that in mind. When I say “allow the image to take shape around you,” hear that not only as “visualize what you remember,” but as “allow the entire multi-sensory atmosphere of the experience to envelop you like it did the first time you experienced the dream.”