Using material from physics, linguistics, philosophy, and other disciplines, I hope to introduce a view of unconscious experience that can expand our view of the unconscious and its clinical utility beyond our present psychoanalytic orientations and metapsychological perspectives. Central to this presentation is the examination of the at once nebulous and possibly direct relationship between unconscious experience and the apprehension of reality, a relationship that challenges, as I see it, the current psychoanalytic emphasis on subjective experience (as in the view, for example, of perception as interpretation), and of our use of the concept of psychic reality.