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In my role as a discussant of Galit Atlas's clinical material, I will first make some general remarks about what I believe the fundamental functions of dreaming are and how best to work with dreams, and then address Dr. Atlas's patient's dreams within their personal and psychoanalytic contexts.
Dreaming is thinking when we are asleep. By definition, dreaming is unconscious thinking, and I see it as the continuation of implicit and explicit processing that occurs during waking. It offers the best window into unconscious thinking.
And what do we dream about? We dream about our most immediate concerns: our dreams include attempts to resolve conflict, to self-regulate, to regulate affect, to envision and move developmentally, to fortress threatened patterns of organization, to consolidate new experience, and to integrate and enhance new learning. Daily events engage the deeper crosscurrents of our lives, activating organizing patterns that constrict or expand, vitalize or devitalize. In what I call the organizing model of dreaming, I have posited that the supraordinate functions of dreaming are to develop, maintain, and restore psychological organization and affect regulation in keeping with shifting motivational priorities (Fosshage, 1983, 1988, 1997, 2007, 2008). Although on one occasion, the dreamer will repeat a familiar, devitalizing way of being in relationship to others (activated during the previous day), on another occasion, the dreamer dreams of a new, expansive way of being, a new vitalizing experience of one's self.
The dream utilizes both imagistic symbolic and verbal symbolic encoding