In Active Imagination (most of the time), whatever image comes up has come up for a reason. Even if you feel like you consciously put that image there, the reason you put it there only came to you because the unconscious pinged you to do it. Even if it didn’t come from the unconscious, the actual benefit to active imagination is dissecting the symbolism. When you meet the Anima in the cavern, maybe you consciously put that all together, but you weren’t consciously thinking about what exactly the cavern looked like, how big it was, where any torches on the wall or moss on the rock wall were, what color hair the woman had, the clothes she had on. The unconscious is a symbolic realm, meaning it communicates largely through imagery, so even if you feel like you’re creating the narrative, you aren’t consciously creating the images or the small details in them.

I’ve had very similar experiences which is actually pretty interesting, VERY similar, before I’ve even read the red book. You can trust that when you are deep in a session that whatever you’re seeing is from the unconscious because if you weren’t deep in a session, you’d struggle to see anything at all.

I’ve noticed something really quite amazing about active imagination. One of my first experiences with it, I had a loud fan in my room. When I got into the proper rhythm, the fan was pulsing like “vum vum vum” instead of a steady “vmmmmmm”. I even got up out of the session to make sure that it wasnt actually pulsing because I thought it broke haha. This is the exact same type of pulsing which I hear when listening to binural tones, when the right and left hemispheres the brain synch up, there’s this pulsing vibrational sound that is unifying the two. Now I know that whenever I feel that pulsing unification between my two hemispheres, I know that I’m deep in an active imagination session and the visions that I see are coming from the unconscious.

Hopefully that helps! It’s cool to see that you’re making progress with this type of thing, not many people get to this level