Developing imaginal literacy is a path of apprenticeship. You apprentice yourself to the vast Psyche you’re a part of, letting it teach you how to navigate it, tend to it, and learn its patterns.
Too often in “courses,” people get stuck on the intellectual knowledge they can glean from it — the notes they can take on the readings and viewings, the techniques they can memorize and occasionally use.
But in an apprenticeship, the knowledge is secondary. What really matters are the skills you develop in the learning container. Knowledge is helpful only to the degree that it helps you hone those skills. Turning that knowledge into practice is central.
That’s the model to keep in mind for everything that follows in this course. The pages that follow aren’t here to be read, watched, noted, and moved on from. They’re here to be mused on and mulled over — to be included in your attempts to practice, to build the skills of mythosomatic dream return.
Because the core of what you’re doing here is an apprenticeship to your own Psyche, the path is going to look very individual. Anything I say, anything you read, any ideas you have about how it will or should go — they’ll all be upset over and over again. That’s a good thing. Like Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path.”
And as Herman Hesse said, along the same lines, “I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.”
This apprenticeship, this course, these ideas and practices I’m presenting — they’re just a scaffold to help you find your way into the life and practice that want to unfold for you. They’re my attempt to help you hear “the teachings your blood whispers to you.”
If at any point, there’s a tension between what you feel your Psyche wanting to do, and what I’m asking you to do, explore what’s coming from your Psyche. If it turns out to be a false start, the course will still be here when you come back, you can pick back up wherever it feels useful. But if you get in the habit of denying yourself, of ignoring the voice of your own path — it’s harder to return to that than to this course.
It’s all about the apprenticeship, about developing the skills and intuitions that will serve you moving forward. So make sure you’re putting more time into the practice than into the reading and watching.
At the beginning of every practice in the course, you’ll see this reminder:
Remember, it’s good to get in the habit where you
It’s important not only to practice more than you consume, but also to intersperse practice with consumption. Many of these lessons only stick when you have some experience to hang them on. If what I’m saying isn’t directly salient to you, you forget it by the time it becomes salient. So it’s best to get as much experience as possible before reaching a given lesson.
Think of it like any other practical skill — car repair, for example. You wouldn’t simply read manuals and diagrams about cars once, and then be able to go and competently fix any car someone drove in. You learn bit by bit, in practical situations, what is relevant.
Each thing you learn allows you to learn more, because now you have more context, you can make more connections. By practicing the skill, reading up on the skill, listening to others talk about the skill, and doing all of these as needed, in the moment, you build up an embodied competence that no mere information could have given you.