As Jung and later analysts described it, active imagination unfolds in two connected stages. In the first, the person deliberately lowers their usual conscious control and lets unconscious material, an image, a mood, a bodily sensation, a fragment of a dream, rise into awareness and develop on its own terms rather than being immediately explained away or dismissed. In the second stage, the person consciously engages with what has surfaced, entering into it as an active participant rather than a passive observer, which might mean continuing a dialogue with an imagined figure, developing a scene further, or working out in words or images what the material seems to be expressing. The method can take many outward forms, painting, sculpting, drawing, writing, movement, or an inner conversation carried out silently or on paper, and analysts have generally held that no single form is required so long as both stages, genuine receptivity followed by genuine engagement, are actually present. Because the technique deliberately opens a channel to unconscious material that can be disturbing, Jungian training has consistently treated active imagination as something best learned under the guidance of an experienced analyst rather than attempted alone without preparation, a caution that appears throughout the clinical literature on the method.