Interview with Mark J. Blechner, Ph.D. and Paul Lippmann, Ph.D.*

JS: I have not met the two of you before, though I know you are acquainted with one another, both of you having received your analytic training, and now serving as faculty members and as training and supervising analysts, at the William Alanson White Institute here in New York City. The three of us are brought together by the books on dreams you each have published recently: Mark J. Blechner's The Dream Frontier (2001) and Paul Lippmann's Nocturnes: On Listening to Dreams (2000).

I'd like to start by making a few observations and see where we go from there. One hundred years or so after the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams, with the publication of these two very fine books on dreams, it is an opportune time for us to meet and, in Paul's phrase, “try to have some good dream conversation.” Unlike Freud's single-minded focus on decoding dreams to reveal their latent content, each of you in your own way approaches dreams with an appreciation for their malleability. For Paul, this reflects his emphasis on dreams as emanating from the essence of the privacy of the mind, unconcerned with engaging with the outside world and more private than even the private self. For Mark, dreams are extralinguistic, free from the demands of communicable social reality, at once utterly honest and not fully graspable by verbal linguistic thought. But for each of you, this respect for the otherness of dreams assists your reading them on their own terms. For Paul, this often means literally attempting to feel your way into the sensory, multilayered experience of the dream to such a degree that interpreting the dream may be superfluous. For Mark, this means a sensitivity to the capacity of dreams to generate forms of thinking of exhilarating novelty, complexity, and power. And finally, as a natural extension of this stance, each of you emphasizes in your technique of working with dreams the importance