The Forgetting: An Active Imagination Experience

I’d been sitting in my office chair for forty-five minutes with my eyes closed, trying to have a conversation with my unconscious.

Active imagination. That’s what Jung called it. What it actually feels like is sitting in the dark and hoping something shows up. Most of the time, nothing does. This time, something did.

I was wrapped in sorrow, shame, anger, and hate. The pressure was unbearable. Every breath felt like resistance against something that wanted to crush me.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

My inner guide—my beloved, in the language of the psyche—responded: “You already have. You have simply forgotten.”

The bonds broke. Something cracked open. I experienced what I can only describe as a rebirth—the archetype of the butterfly emerging from the cocoon. Not a metaphor. Not a thought exercise. A felt, bodily experience of becoming something new by shedding what was suffocating me.

What followed was a sense of love so total it filled everything. Not romantic love. Not even personal love. Something bigger—a love that permeated my being and the world around me. Jung would call this an encounter with the collective unconscious, the layer of psyche where personal experience dissolves into something universal.

Then the clouds came. Rain. And with it, fear. “What if I die?”

My guide’s response: “Would that be so bad?”

That question didn’t comfort me. It confronted me. I imagined falling. The color draining from everything. Sinking into mud. “This is the end. What comes next?”

This is what Jung’s tradition calls the dark night of the soul—the experience of ego death, where everything you’ve constructed as “self” feels like it’s dissolving. It’s terrifying. It’s also, for many people, the precursor to the most significant shift they’ll ever go through.

What Came Back

In my total surrender to the void, something shifted. The guide returned: “Hello. Welcome back.”

And I was consumed again by love and being. “God is Love. I am love. We are One.”

I opened my eyes. The room was the same. My coffee was cold. The dog was staring at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. But something had shifted, and I couldn’t unfeel it.

I’m sharing this not because my experience should be yours. It shouldn’t. Active imagination is deeply personal, and what emerges is different for everyone. But the pattern holds: within our deepest forgettings lie the seeds of our greatest rememberings. The parts of ourselves we’ve lost track of—the strength, the love, the capacity for change—they haven’t gone anywhere.

They’re waiting for us to stop being too busy to notice.

What have you forgotten that might be worth remembering?