risky dreams

Telling and listening to a dream is a curiously intimate business. On the one hand it's part even of our pre-Freudian understanding of dreams that they can reveal more about us than we realise. Still, as it were, dreaming the dream, still caught up within its interiority, we tell it to someone, only to realise that we might have well have just blurted out our most intimate wishful fantasies, might have well have called a current lover by the name of a lost but unrelinquished love. Caught up still within the dream we don't notice until too late the latent meaning which then bangs us on the forehead as we clothe it in words which are not under our omnipotent control, as we are forced now to mean - to acknowledge the previously unevident implications in - what we say. A meaning which bangs us on the forehead in the same way in which a fish finally comes to understand it has been swimming in water only when for a moment it jumps out of the pool. Here the intimacy is part function of the inherent riskiness of the dream.

Yet telling a dream is also intimate just because it truly does speak to our ownmost preoccupations. And the risk we take here in telling the dream is not the negative one of exposing our shameful fantasies, but the positive one of someone welcoming us, accepting us, in our anxieties and longings.  This, I think, is the most powerful dimension of psychoanalysis or person-centred psychotherapy: a therapist listens to the patient's productions without judgement, accepting them as moments in the evolution of their soul. This loving attitude then becomes internalised in the patient's mind's fabric. Then they can allow themselves to be at the developmental level, or to have the preoccupations, they really are at and do have. And so, because of that, sequestered regions of the psyche start to rejoin the gang, and become once more live components of its self-becoming.