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The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it.
Some time back I attempted to make some preliminary links between psychoanalysis and Henri Lefebvre's study of the production of space (Pile, 1996; see also Lefebvre, 1974). At the time, putting psychoanalysis and space together seemed like a strange thing to do. The analysis of the psyche, on the one hand, seemed to have little to do with space, on the other, because space was commonly thought of as being only the abstract, external, asocial, cold stage upon which human dramas played out. However, other understandings of space, as suggested by people such as Lefebvre (and many others), are not based on the assumption that space is abstract, ahistorical, invariable, immortal. Instead, space is seen as something that is socially produced. In this understanding, it is not hard to imagine that the psyche might also produce space: be it city space or architectural space. More than this, space—including city space and architectural space—might even act back on the psyche, in a dynamic interaction, with each (overtly and covertly) modifying the other. The possibility of a dynamic interrelationship between space and the psyche, though, begs questions—questions, naturally, with many possible avenues of approach and argument. In this paper, I will use dreams as a way of simultaneously evoking something social, something psychic, and something spatial. I would like to argue, as strongly as possible, that dreams provide us with a model for understanding the place of the psychological in the production of space, regardless of whether that is city space, architectural space, or personal space.