The Dream and the Underworld: Reinterpreting Katabasis

In this session, we enter the two opening chapters of The Dream and the Underworld—a work that challenges the assumption that dreams are symbolic expressions of waking life.

Hillman proposes something far more radical:
dreams do not belong to the waking world at all. They arise from the underworld—an imaginal domain with its own logic, autonomy, and mode of experience. Here, images are not representations to interpret, but presences to encounter.

This shift redefines descent—katabasis—not as a temporary fall, but as a sustained mode of psychic reality in which meaning does not resolve and the psyche is not entirely “ours.”

We will explore:
• Why dreams resist reductive interpretation and what it means to encounter them directly
• The underworld as an imaginal reality rather than a symbolic layer
• Katabasis as a mode of experience, not a stage to overcome
• Whether dream figures are meanings—or autonomous presences