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IN THIS PAPER I SHALL REPORT ON various aspects of the dreams of patients with borderline personality disorders. I have observed that among such patients, as well as in certain ambulatory schizophrenics who are relatively well-functioning, there are characteristics that appear regularly in their dreams during the earliest stages of psychoanalytic treatment. Moreover, as treatment progresses, and the patient's symptomatology is resolved and overall functioning is improved, there are consistent changes in the structure of the dream narrative and the level of bizarreness. A study of these changes in manifest content may help us formulate some of the shifts in psychic processes which occur during successful psychoanalytic treatment.
As illustrations, consider the following:
Communication A: I was lying in bed. My left arm was disconnected. It was on the opposite side of the bed. I felt opaque.
Communication B: You were sitting on my right side as I was speaking. You were writing something down in a notebook. Whenever you wrote something down, I thought it was important.
Both of these communications were made by the same patient during the first month of treatment. One of them is a dream. The other is a report of a waking experience. I ask the reader to consider, which seems to be the dream?
One might suspect that Communication A is the more dreamlike of the two. It is an event that would not happen in the real world. It has an idiosyncratic use of words—a physical property, opacity, is described as a feeling. Communication B, on the other hand, seems like a simple report of a real event. There is no bizarreness, and the situation is described matter-of-factly, in an orderly narrative.
Yet B is the dream report, and A is the report of the actual