Freud said that dreams were the ‘royal road to the unconscious’. Having explored and worked with the possibilities of dreams for the last seventeen years, it is my feeling that dreams are only a readily available doorway to our inner world. Jung suggests that what he called ‘active imagination’ gave one a fuller access. His description of using a fantasy with the hands is one of the ways he suggests of using active imagination. It involves the principle of coex which gives a much fuller entrance to the ‘more’ in us. When other doorways to the unconscious, such as dream work or meditation, are allied with the function of self regulation, they become more powerful tools.

Because coex does provide such a full entrance into the unconscious, one needs to learn some of the basic principles which apply to the inner world of the mind. Meeting the contents of this part of ourselves are in many ways quite different from confronting events outside of us. Without realising it we have developed finely tuned responses to thousands of things and situations in our outer environment. Depending upon where one lives, from earliest childhood one begins to learn how to watch roads, avoid certain plants, eat others, respond to some people in one way and others in another. All these responses enable us to survive . If just one or two of those responses lapsed for a few minutes we could be killed. People often ask me if there are any dangers in using coex. Yes, there are dangers. But life itself is dangerous, driving a car is dangerous. In some areas walking down a street could be suicidal.

The dangers of coex do not seem to me as possibly fatal as those of driving a car. As with driving a car however, if we learn certain rules and use them, the dangers become negligible.

The first rule is to avoid carrying pride or overconfidence into the use of coex. This would be like believing that because you have survived the streets of London or New York, you can safely climb a mountain. Different rules apply, and different skills are needed. So if you have not made contact with your unconscious before, recognise that you are a novice. Start slowly and take your time working through the exercises and techniques given in this book. Start from the beginning and go step by step.

The second rule is to clearly remember the nature of the process you are dealing with. It is self regulatory and it is the dream process. As such it has something of a direction of its own. Given any opportunity of expressing to consciousness, it will begin to work on its business in hand. For instance, supposing you had been attacked by a dog in childhood, and in your shock you had held back a lot of the emotions resulting from the attack. Perhaps you parents had even said something like, "Don’t cry. The dog’s gone now. It’s all okay now." Of course in the realm of your body and inner life it isn’t okay. Perhaps a powerful urge to run was stifled by fear. Maybe anger and shocked emotions were suppressed. It could be that you wanted to scream at your parents asking why they weren’t there to protect you. Many such impulses are stored in each of us. They need to be discharged or allowed in order to release the inner pressure and tension they cause. If such impulses are not released or re-evaluated they can be stored in our being for a lifetime, contributing to such illnesses as arthritis and cancer. Many people experience coex without such scenes of childhood arising. But if we are going to use coex we need to realise that they may, and deal with them understandingly if they do.

If such an event arises it is somewhat like childbirth. There are events presaging it; there is a middle; and there is a completion. It could take several sessions of practice to get the whole event expressed and integrated. To stop in the middle simply leaves one in an uncomfortable feeling. It is wiser to carry on in the next session, and arrive at the completed experience sooner. What was suppressed inside oneself is, during coex, bulging up into consciousness, into ones very personality, not safely exterior to oneself. Jane’s desires for compulsive eating, quoted at the end of chapter four are a good example of this. By meeting the feelings in another session, Jane could have cleared it more quickly.

Because we are also dealing with the dream process, what arises may be presented in symbols of movement or experience. This has already been fairly well covered in previous chapters. Nevertheless it must be remembered. As human beings we have strong desires to see our pet theories ‘proved’ by what emerges from our own mysterious within. Recently, in an Arthur C. Clarke program about reincarnation, time was given to a subject apparently re-living a past life as a British soldier. The man, under hypnosis, cried out and jerked as he was wounded in the arm. The question from the hypnotist was, how could anyone express such things with such drama unless they were from real experience? Measured against what one experiences in dreams, and what I have witnessed people expressing during coex, the subjects dramatic expression was flaccid and without depth. The dream process can create a drama around any given theme. But it has a tendency to use scenes or characters from history or literature to express what situations occur within us. While Arthur Clarke was rightly sceptical of the claims for the validity of the hypnotised subjects experience, he misses the above point, that ones unconscious expresses its own internal conflicts in such themes.

This is so important I will quote an edited version of Brian’s experiences with such symbolised events, which appeared originally in my INSTANT DREAM BOOK.

"It started with a dream in which I was in the First World War in Germany. The Germans had taken a hill we had been defending, and I had been captured. I had learnt to allow fantasy which included my body and feelings - coex - and when I continued the dream in this way I experienced in a very deep sense being a prisoner and being tied to a bed. German officers tortured me by crushing my left foot, but I wouldn’t give information. During the fantasy my body actually took on the position of being tied and tortured and I cried out. It all seemed real to me. I didn’t go through the physical pain of being tortured, but I certainly couldn’t see how I could make up such a thing. I even knew my name as that soldier, so I thought it must be memories of a past life.

"Because I couldn’t understand or feel conclusive about the first coex session I took another. The fantasy continued as if having a real and orderly source. Because I would not talk I was strapped on the bed face down and a line of German soldiers came and, one after the other buggered me. "

Brian took two more sessions in which he began to break through the symbols. In one he felt attacked by two youths. In the second he realises the attack is to do with his own teenage sexuality. He goes on to say:-

"From that explosion of realisation all the other things fell into place. I remembered that as a teenager my uncle had given me a set of volumes about the First World War. I used to sit and look through the photos for ages. My dream and fantasy had taken the war as an expression of my own terrible inner conflict about sex. I had been a prisoner of that conflict, and had been tortured by it. My left foot represented my inner feelings of confidence to stand up or support myself as a man. The buggery and the attack by the youths were one and the same. Because I had never masturbated, never allowed myself a wet dream, or any flow of sexuality, the pressure of sexual drive had been introverted. Again and again I had felt that pressure as an attack - inside myself - which I had resisted, until I was buggered as a youthful personality."