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Reflecting on certain analytic experiences and discussing them with small groups of colleagues, for some time I have found myself informally using the concept of an environment with reference to dreams. Having searched the literature unsuccessfully for any explicit treatment of the subject, in this paper I shall present the results of an investigation of the potential meaning-space (Sandler, 1983) of the concept of the dream environment, in order to evaluate its relevance to and value for both theory and clinical practice.
I shall begin by examining certain phenomena that can be traced back to related, albeit not completely identical, concepts, and shall then increasingly focus on a nucleus of more specific meanings. In so doing, I shall, without any claim to a systematic consideration, touch upon some nodal points of dream theory and of the theory of the dream work that I felt to be particularly pertinent to my subject.
An environment may first of all correspond to a background (as in a painting) against which, or scenario (in the sense of a stage set) within which, the characters of a dream appear and play their parts.
Resnik (1982) takes the theatrical metaphor as the organizing principle of his approach to the world of dreams, and regards the scenario as «the landscape of the dream,” which imparts shape and colour to the space where the players perform the drama; he emphasizes its total relevance to the interpretative work of analysis.
Grassano and her Argentine colleagues (1995) conducted a group-based research project on the «dream scenario,” to which they devoted a theoretical study and a parallel collective consideration of clinical material contributed by the participants. The initial hypothesis, confirmed by the research, was that attention to the background of the dream scene in addition to the scene itself can facilitate the emergence of aspects