Synopsis: Voyager’s crew comes across aliens who live in their dream states.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of one of Carl (C. G.) Jung’s methods of working with dream material, which he called active imagination.
In “Waking Moments” Voyager’s crew seems to all be having dreams that contain an image of an alien. More alarmingly, The Doctor informs Captain Kathryn Janeway that many of the crew cannot be wakened and suggests that the rest of the crew try not to sleep. Commander Chakotay tells Janeway that he believes that similar to a vision quest, he can enter the dream state and use lucid dreaming to ascertain why this is happening. Chakotay enters the dream and the alien tells him that his species lives in the dream state and that once Voyager clears the area of space they claim as theirs, the crew will safely awake. However, in the dream the alien lied to Chakotay, and when they reach where Chakotay believed the crew would be safe, instead, the alien’s vessel fires upon Voyager, boards her, and traps the crew in the cargo bay. Chakotay alone is still awake and is able to beam down to a nearby planet to find the alien population all asleep and a dampening field employed against Voyager. Chakotay traveling between the waking and dream states is able to convince the aliens to release Voyager.
In this episode, as well as earlier ones, Chakotay has explained the idea of a vision quest as a way to seek guidance from characters that one encounters in a state of altered consciousness. This is very similar to what Jung called active imagination. To Jung, active imagination was a way to work with individual people, animals, or other images that appeared in dreams, as a way to ask them what they wanted of us. He famously used this process over 100 years ago when he was working on his Red Book, which in turn became the source of all his theories. However, as Chakotay discovered, sometimes the things that appear to us in dreams can be dangerous or unwanted. As a caution, always keep in mind that it is possible for one to go so far into the unconscious state so that one can’t find a way back. For this reason, it may be advisable to work with a trusted guide when seeking to do dreamwork.
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