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In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917), Wallace Stevens makes the point that meaning is not simply something inherent in an object of contemplation but something that emerges in the intersubjective relation between the object and its beholder. There are many ways of looking at dreams and no doubt countless ways of looking at any individual dream. As the authors of our specimen dreams note, Freud (1900) originally considered dreams in terms of the fulfillment of infantile wishes. Later he came to see anxiety dreams as efforts to master traumatic experience by preparing the psyche for what once overwhelmed it.
Bonnie Litowitz asks how several of us think of dreams and use them in our clinical work, giving me the opportunity to try to put into words my way (or ways) of looking at such blackbirds. I have been much influenced by Fosshage's idea (1997) that dreams represent the psyche's creative efforts to organize and synthesize experience coherently, rather than being productions of a drive-driven mechanism for the expression of forbidden wishes. And I like Bollas's idea that the atmosphere of the dream represents in part the subject's unthought known (1987, p, 70), that is, the look and feel of his or her psychologically constitutive universe. Freud taught us to ask our patients to associate to the images of any dream with a view toward revealing the latent dream thoughts behind the dream's so-called manifest content. But in a recent paper Atwood (2015) analyzes the manifest content of two dreams and argues that the dreamer's associations are often misleading in “locating the [all-important] context of experience” to which the dream belongs. I often ask my patients to associate to their dreams, but I often interpret the manifest content when