Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming

This article appears as the first chapter in Dr. Ogden's latest book, Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming, recently published by Jason Aronson Inc. in early October 2001. fort da gratefully acknowledges permission from Jason Aronson Inc. to reprint this chapter in full, including references in the publisher's format.

This is a book of conversations: spoken, unspoken, and yet-to-be-spoken conversations between (and within) analysts and their patients; imaginary and real conversations (the imaginary ones, such as dreaming and reverie, being often the most real); wordless conversations between poets and the poems they make, and between poems and the readers they make; conversations between feelings and thoughts, and between thoughts and words; conversations between the inexpressible and the expressible, a distance mediated by metaphor, by the sounds and cadences of words and sentences, and by images and gestures (verbal and otherwise); and, of course, the conversation between us, reader and writer, a conversation that derives life from all of the other conversations, and imparts life to them.

And, as if by accident (but it is certainly not a matter of chance), the very word conversation is in conversation with itself, spawning metaphors as it goes. The word conversation is “fossil poetry” (Emerson 1844, p. 231), derived from the conjunction of the Latin words cum, meaning with or together, and versus, meaning a row or furrow of earth; the movement of a plough turning back on itself as it ends one row and begins the next; and a line of poetry or other writing. Conversation is a word that has preserved in itself a chorus of accumulated meanings that speak both from the experience of opening the earth for purposes of impregnating/planting and from the experience of entering into language for purposes of communicating with ourselves and others. Thus, conversation is an act of engaging with another person in the work of creating man-made lines, lines of furrowed soil re