If we can bring a degree of alertness and openness to the threshold, the dream world will reach out to meet us. The dream world provides us with its unique view on the world and we bring our questions, our capacity for learning, and our ability to be surprised. This marriage, of inner world and outer world, can provide our lives with much needed insight, energy, passion, and meaning. Active Imagination is not hypnosis, contemplation, or meditation. Hypnosis asks us to turn off our alert mind to enter into the world of unconsciousness.
Contemplation seeks to sharpen the mind's reasoning ability.
Meditation asks us to move away from the dream world and our everyday mind through focusing on a single word, our breathing, or our movement. Elements of all of these practices are touched upon when practicing Active Imagination. But, Active Imagination relies upon an alert mind, the non-rational, and a high level of inner creative fludity. This is the only sort of environment that the inner marriage of everyday consciousness and the dream world can exist. Sometimes, Active Imagination occurs naturally, without utilizing a technique such as was brought to the psychotherapeutic mainstream by C. G. Jung .