(2002). Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 57:118–130.
The concept of a dream-within-a-dream is studied intensively. The illusion created by the dream work portrays one portion of a dream enacted within the envelope of another. Freud (1900) emphasized that the function of placing a piece of reality in a dream within a dream is an attempt to rob it of its significance and obliterate it. However, he seemed curiously disinterested in the fact that segmentation of a dream text into two seemingly discrete fragments does offer a dream investigator the opportunity to explore he dynamic relationship between the two fragments and the multiple meanings of the illusion created during sleep. In this study the linkage between the two parts of the dream sequence is highlighted. While Freud's intuition is corroborated, his lack of interest in the duality of the dream events is puzzling, as if he believed that only the dream within a dream is meaningful and the complementary and contextual dream sequence can be ignored. This paper suggests that both portions of the dream within a dream are significant, the one helping to explicate the other as the free-associative process of dream interpretation gives equal democratic time to both.
Why would a dreamer immersed in the illusion of dream imagine that he has awakened but in fact go on dreaming a “new dream” so that on actual awakening his experience will seem to have been a dream within a dream? If one pictures a dream within a dream cinematically and if it is possible to retrieve the unconscious moment that signals the end of reel one and the activation of reel two, so to speak, what unique unconscious psychology could account for this cinematographic decision?
The topic was first introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1900 and since then has received scant attention (Berman 1985; Silber 1983, etc.). Whether this means that the phenomenon is rare or simply underreported is not clear.
Freud in 1900 insisted that a dream within a dream was a sure sign that something that had actually happened was being disavowed vehemently. “If a particular event is inserted into a dream … by the dream work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event” (Freud 1990, p. 338). To place a dream within the envelope of another dream suggested that a reality was being hidden with such precision that an astute awakener would raise his eyebrows at the elaborate mechanism of disguise.
In this paper I would like not only to re-examine Freud's thesis but also to address his neglect of the envelope as he focused solely on its contents. In other words, I will argue that a dream within a dream has two dream portions, one seemingly housed in the other, that both portions are part of one elaborate illusion, and that both can be studied profitably.
One assumption of this paper is that a “formal” re-textualization of the unfolding semiotic of a dream must be in response to the emergence in the dream state of affect that cannot be disguised with the “usual” primary processes (condensation, displacement, symbolism) but requires a fundamental relocation of the drama to resolve or at least manage the conflict and keep the dreamer asleep. That is, reels are switched dramatically for urgent dynamic reasons.
The dream within a dream that is scrutinized here occurred in the eighth year of an analysis, a clinical context that allowed the topic to be viewed through the lens of a complex transference neurosis. Genetics, dynamics, transference, and countertransference had been explicated again and again so that termination was now the focus and perhaps one of the main triggers of the dream.
The dreamer is 56 years old, South African (significant in the sense that he often referred to his enslaved soul as a “Mandela,” long incarcerated but yearning to be free), an ex-priest, a professor of philosophy, recently married, with one child. The analysis could be portrayed as the deconstruction of a conscience so Jesuitical in its brilliant mixture of menace, mischief, and multiple ambiguities as to be almost unreachable, its mental quicksilver visible, touchable, but hard to pick up or hold onto.
The dream was reported as follows:
I awake at the sound of a car pulling into the driveway of our Connecticut house. It is pitch dark, but a child is being dropped off as if our home were a nursery school. All this seemed natural in a dream experience even though the time, the darkness, would have been highly unusual for such a drop-off in real time. The scene shifts. I am now outside my house but lost, trying to find my bearings. A child on a bicycle guides me home. Then I walk from my house in Connecticut to Greenwich Village, which in my dream geography seems no more than a hundred yards. I am so surprised by the spatial novelty of Connecticut's [being] a stone's throw from Greenwich Village that I wake up, an illusion, as I will discover on actual awakening. In Greenwich Village I walk into a wood-lined office in a townhouse. A bearded man, not unlike the young Freud in the Freud-Fliess era, greets me. I start to tell him the unusual dream I've just had about being lost and how it was a child who guided me home.
When the dreamer awakes he begins to tell his wife the dream immediately and while recounting the dream has a déjà vu phenomenon, as if he had told her the dream already. He is aware that the dream-within-a-dream phenomenon of telling the dream to the bearded man in Greenwich Village is what gives the déjà vu experience with his wife such an uncanny feeling.
(A dream followed by a déjà vu feeling is noteworthy, a point I will address later.)
The associations were genetic, dynamic, free-flowing, and far-ranging. New insights were generated as dream and dream within dream were examined for several weeks. The theme of a lost childhood as well as an actual experience of being lost at age five, had been analyzed from various angles down the years. But the dream-within-a-dream treatment of it seemed to generate new affects, more intense memory. The analysand, whose reading of Freud was deep and well-integrated into his overall philosophical knowledge (a factor that could be a resistance at times but often was a promoter of insight) was not unaware of Freud's contributions to the topic. “One hides in a dream within a dream an actual event,” he commented, paraphrasing Freud. “In that case, depending on which of the dreams is within the other, being lost could be the disavowed actuality,
or is it ‘telling’ about it that is the significant reality that is being relegated to dream life, doubly displaced, and captioned as non-real in its dream-within-dream status?” Several questions had been raised that would take time to address. If there was no new “topic” at this stage of analysis, the same could not be said of affect. Memory and history were not files in an unconscious library but sudden revelations of the self in a living mirror that could surprise and astonish no matter how clever the defensive anticipations.
Which part of the dream was within the other? If the totality of the dream is looked upon as one text, the illusion of waking up and telling the dream to a bearded man in Greenwich Village would seem to be the part of the dream that is within the other, larger, earlier part. However, looking at the dream as a total text, one could argue that the first part is being told again in the later dream and is therefore “within” it, making the analysand's question not as “intellectual” as it seemed at first blush. This raises the question as to whether the two dream pieces can be studied in isolation or separately, a task Silber (1983) set himself in his brilliant paper on the topic, no doubt to keep his focus scientific and uncluttered.
Which actuality was being disguised, the experience of being lost or the telling about it? This led to a series of intriguing sessions, but some genetic context must be described to make the narrative intelligible.
Mr. Perdu (a fictitious name for the analysand) had recounted early in his analysis how once as a child in Johannesburg he had been playing with older boys who suddenly went about their own business, forgetting the younger one who'd been entrusted to their care. He imagines that he was five or six in the memory. A kind gentleman on a bicycle rode him home to his house. In later years, whenever this incident was recalled, his mother would rail against the boy to whom she had entrusted her son, taking little responsibility for her own negligence. Mr. P was aware that in the dream “a child on a bicycle who guided him home” was a reversal of the actual roles of child and adult 50 years before the dream. This childhood memory had been analyzed intensely, but the reversal and the elaborate dream work that dream-within-dream implied suggested, as Freud would have argued, that this was the reality whose disavowal in dream-within-dream was in fact a powerful affirmation of its significance.
Mr. P, an only child, had for years insisted that a great closeness had existed between him and his mother—an assertion that memory and dream seemed to challenge. His father's alcoholism and fiscal irresponsibility left the family in dire straits often, until the mother started her own business and essentially became the breadwinner. The father's character was dramatically revealed in a childhood memory: in bed with the father after a bad dream, the child urinated while asleep. The father, startled, reprimanded the child, creating a sense of distance between son and father that was never redressed. Years later in analysis, the adult would comment bitterly: “The warm flow of my intimacy was lost on him.” He idealized the mother's resourcefulness and courage and could not remember ever feeling any anger toward her.
The anger he felt toward his father could not be expressed either except in pity and shame. A vicious superego became the heir of these unspeakable hatreds for years, quite egosyntonic with the vicious Catholic god Mr. P had enshrined in the Vatican of his mind throughout his preanalytic existence. But an unconscious Mandela was there too, as mentioned earlier, longing to break the shackles. The shackles, like most psychological shackles, were “mind-forged manacles,” as Blake suggested, and the forge had a complex artistry that displayed its symptoms but not the mold, which remained well hidden. Mr. P was aware that the dream within a dream had exposed the mold more than ever and that the revelation should be pounced on and exploited. “There's loss in one piece of the dream and telling about it in the other,” he exclaimed. This eureka of insight provoked a re-examination of all the previously stoked genetic embers. The concepts of “loss” and “telling” themes that were sounded often, were about to lend themselves to variations that surprised the analysand with their novelty despite their ancient origins. Loss had been a theme that both antedated and postdated the actual childhood loss that occurred, when his older playmates abandoned him. The oedipal years were characterized by incestuous closeness to a mother who had distanced herself from a negligent husband, seducing her son, figuratively speaking, with confidences and intimacies that belonged more appropriately in the relationship with her husband.
“There's no telling what I was told,” the analysand would quip ironically and cynically as he tried to invoke the childhood atmosphere of loneliness and closeness, a paradox that made more and more sense to him as
he explored the absence of his father from his life and the undifferentiated presence of his mother. The “loss” of his father had been passively experienced in the sense that Mr. P never questioned his father's self-destructive character or his mother's compliance with it. He never “told” his father off for his chronic neglect, and he never told his mother off for her abandonment of her dialogue with his father and “seduction” of her son. Instead, he assumed that his “loss” was coming to him, something he deserved for secretly hating both of them. The actual incident of loss at age five, traumatic and real, in itself, was also a screen for deeper losses. Religion was “telling” in the ironic sense that the analysand felt he was telling very private intimacies to the wrong people, priests who in hindsight often seemed unworthy of this revelations. Minor childhood symptoms of latency stealing were adjudicated as major crimes in the confession box, a kind of childhood supreme court that would eventually, of course, take up permanent residence in his superego, through processes of introjection and identification. In retrospect he realized that he hated his mother for supporting a primitive institution that exploited a child's guilt rather than explaining it and exploring it empathically, as analysis would do many years later. “I should have told the priest off. Instead, I swallowed my guts and became a priest myself, identification with the aggressor and victim all at once I suppose.” The bitterness of this reconstruction was palpable as insight savored anew the old love, the old hatred, the relentless conflict.
That his life was about being lost and telling people about it had become more central in the analysis than ever before, thanks to the double vision of the dream and the insight it afforded about the meaning of loss and the meaning of communication (telling) and how both could be corrupted by a defensive psychology that would attempt to keep them apart. “It will be important for me to tell you how much I hate you as termination reprises this sense of loss for yet another time,” the analysand said, stepping into the reality of the analytic journey's end with very genuine affect.
The many meanings of the dream-within-dream psychology were uncovered in this rich free-associative process. Telling intimacies to parent, priest, analyst seemed to be one psychological seed of the dream process; loss as experience, loss as unconscious punishment or fear, the other.
The dream thoughts beneath the manifest content of both segments of the dream sequence could be summarized as follows:
The child “delivered” to the house at an “odd” hour is the wish to have a child in the primal scene. The primal crime of the first part of the dream is punished by loss of bearings, loss of home. This stirs up the reality of the actual traumatic loss in childhood, which is reversed in the representation of “a child guided me home.” This reversal seems not adequate to the task; “reel switching” becomes necessary. In the “new” dream portion, after the illusion of awakening there is confession to a bearded man who represents father and analyst (neither one bearded in reality). “Beard” represents undoing of the wish to castrate father and analyst for “forcing” him to confess, for not having a baby with him, for not allowing him to be a permanent analytic baby, for forcing him out as termination approaches. The distance between Connecticut (“connect” as opposite to the “disconnection” of loss) and Greenwich Village is “destroyed,” time space altered magically in the new “Greenwich Mean Time” of unconscious timelessness.
This summary does not address the central question of this paper even though it is an essential preamble. The analysand's intellectual doggedness about the dream-within-a-dream mechanism was the engine that generated more and more free-associative information about what he playfully referred to as this “unconscious curiosity.” The possibility of reaching a compromise between the wish to tell the dream to someone and the wish to stay asleep was entertained as one potential motivation, but there were deeper currents also, he felt sure.
Mr. P was puzzled that the reality of being lost as a child, which had received much scrutiny in the analysis, could still show up in a dream within a dream, as if to insist that it still needed to be disavowed intensely! We had reconstructed it pretty well. Which stone had been left unturned? As Mr. P pursued this issue associatively, overwhelming “new” affects appeared genetically and transferentially. Deep-seated anger toward mother emerged. How could she have entrusted a five-year-old to careless older boys? What did that reveal about the whole ramshackle structure of early care he must have received from a harried young mother starting her own business on the ruins of her husband's psychological and fiscal collapse? Who was this makeshift father; what made him tick?
This genetic current of intense affect could turn transferential from hour to hour. What kind of an analyst could have reconstructed so intellectually, leaving the deepest affects untouched? Was the analyst lost in some dream within a dream of his own to have overlooked the most significant meanings? This analytic volatility, genetic and transferential all at once, led to the revelation that the reality of childhood loss had not been fully analyzed, if it ever could be. It was clear that affect would always remain. Sorrow, pain, anger, memory could be understood in analysis but not eliminated, not exorcised. The confessional offered absolution, the wipe-out of sin. The couch could offer only understanding, the sober dignity of truth rather than the appeal of illusion!
Communication itself was corrupted in childhood, be believed, when “telling” to a priest became mandatory. Even when he was no longer a priest, the inquisitional dialogue continued within, in the internal confessional. Much of the analytic work in the transference neurosis was an attempt to rehabilitate communication itself, to rescue it from its inquisitional origins. By putting trauma in one dream and “telling” in a dream within it, the analysand was declaring that “telling” was as great a trauma as trauma itself, and that the two should not be confused. If he had been able to “tell” his mother off for entrusting him carelessly to the older boys, the original trauma might not have retained its “actual” significance or its symbolic significance as a screen for all the other “tellings” that had been left unsaid. Considering the first part of the dream as the dream within the larger dream (the dream in its totality), the analysand argued that the child guiding him home could be viewed as a fulfillment of the wish that the older boy had not betrayed him or, better still, that he had been able to tell the boy off and demand that the boy not betray him but guide him home. The capacity to talk straight to one's peers in childhood (or adulthood, for that matter) is a measure of how “straight” one felt one could be in the dialogue with father or mother. Developmental achievement cannot be sustained without some early object constancy. If the breast is the first curriculum, baby talk is the first dialogue. Essentially telling and loving go hand in hand unless the system breaks down for defensive reasons.
If one undoes the division between the two dream parts and treats the text as a seamless document, one reading of the text could be articulated as follows: “I want a baby delivered to me in darkness, a primal-scene
reversal in which I am not excluded. For this, the punishment is loss of the object or loss of the love of the object” (castration fear disavowed perhaps as “regressive” object loss screens the more oedipal punishment). “‘A child guided me home’ redresses this. Finally, the wish to tell all to a bearded man represents the undoing of the father's castration and a man-to-man dialogue between son and parent in which aggression and sexuality need not be denied in the new space analysis has cleared for straight talk.”
If that was the seamless vision of the dream, why was the illusion of dream within dream necessary at all? To all the defensive reasons alluded to earlier, the analysand added that a dream within a dream is like one dream spawning another. The wish to have the oedipal baby with the analyst, with the mother, with the father, could be represented through the formal disguise of one dream giving birth to another, one dream invaginated in the other in an act of oneiric copulation. One dream was the dream child of the other, so to speak. When the analysis ended, the patient remarked with characteristic irony, “There's no telling what the future holds.” While this was obviously true, it seemed clear that the future would hold a more enlightened vision of the past and that a dream within a dream could claim some of the credit for it.
The concept of a dream within a dream, first introduced by Freud in 1900, usually serves as the starting point for all subsequent inquiry. While Freud is very assertive as to the meaning of the phenomenon, the clinical evidence that would justify such theoretical certitude is not cited. Was Freud's clinical specimen too personal perhaps, too self-revealing? It is unlikely that the question can ever be answered. But we can assume that Freud had an actual dream-within-a-dream experience in mind when he stated, “To include something in a ‘dream within a dream’ is thus equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a dream had never happened… . If a particular event is inserted into a dream … by the dream work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation of it” (Freud 1990, p. 338). This sounds like dogma rather than science unless the actual clinical evidence is produced so that the reasoning behind it can be assessed.
Let us try to imagine the specimen dream within a dream Freud was commenting on: A dream is unfolding. An infantile wish is struggling to represent itself in the distorted disguised manner that Freud himself was the first to elucidate so ingeniously. Is Freud suggesting that if this “usual” process of disguised wish fulfillment stirs up an actual traumatic memory, stumbles on an actual piece of historic truth, the alarmed dreamer, close to nightmare, will change the subject drastically and spin a new dream in which to disavow the “reality” that had threatened to destroy the precarious dream structure and ruin a good night's sleep? In a sense the dream-within-a-dream strategy wards off an impending nightmare by switching reels, to invoke the cinematographic metaphor once again. All defense could be viewed as an unconscious strategic change of subject, usually a lot more subtle than stopping a dream in its tracks and starting a new one. Can we assume that the unconscious engine that drives all defensive strategy can lose its subtlety, regressively perhaps, in an emergency such as the verge of nightmare in a dream state would represent? Are there any developmental prototypes of this drastic, primitive, clumsy kind of deployment of defense? A child at play offers the most graphic depiction of sudden subject changing. A child depicting oedipal subject matter in triadic representations of horse, lion, and tiger in conflict at a moment of extreme anxiety may toss horse, lion, and tiger aside and start a new play schema involving sheep, cow, and donkey! To the child analyst observer this may seem a lot more obviously defensive that it appears to the child. What seems crude to the adult may seem subtle to the child at play. Similarly, in the dream state, reel-switching that sets the dream-within-dream strategy in motion may seem like a subtle escape clause to the dreamer even if it appears crude or obvious to the sophisticated Freudian awakener.
Are there other prototypes of the dream-within-dream experience that the unconscious dream cinematographer can exploit as he rummages through the prop rooms of the past? Can one assume that the dream stagehands are resourceful and can “use” any prior experience of the dreamer however they like in the service of disguise? Just as the unconscious can be aware of somatic illness sooner than the consciousness of the patient, announcing illness in dream life before the diagnosis has been arrived at, can we assume that the unconscious, once it has “experienced” a sense of depersonalization, for instance, can subsequently
“use” it in dream life as an “out of body” feeling or an “out of dream” feeling such as a dream within a dream would entail? I am suggesting that once there has been a feeling of the uncanny in waking life, what's to stop dream life from recycling it unconsciously and reprising it in dream life as a dream within a dream? Surely it is this kind of uncanny recycling that the poet tries to capture when he says, “La vida es sueño” (Calderón de la Barca 1636) or “our little life is rounded with a sleep” (Shakespeare 1611, Act 4 Scene 10). If this implies an even greater continuity between dream life and waking life than is usually thought of, a reciprocal cross-fertilization of one by the other, it may also highlight a cultural mistrust of the oneiric in Occidental circles, Oriental culture being far less discriminating when it comes to distinguishing dream life from waking life, as the title of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's (1984), astute study, “Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities,” suggests.
To return to Freud's pronouncement that material in a dream within a dream is absolute evidence of a reality that is being disavowed: unless a dynamic sequence of dream events is invoked that leads to the eruption onto the dream stage of an alarming piece of reality, which then must be dealt with drastically by banishment into a new dream space altogether, it is difficult to know how to make sense of Freud's categorical assertion. Without the dynamic associative trail of oneiric events that lead to the eruption of the unwanted reality into the dream and its subsequent expulsion into the illusion of the adjoining dream, we would have to take Freud's word for it without any proof, an exercise in blind faith that the founder of psychoanalysis would not endorse even when his own scientific data are under scrutiny. In this instance we need the clinical existence of Freud's dream-within-dream data before we can pass judgment on the merit of the theory. It is for this reason that I have dared to imagine the clinical legs Freud's theory stands on.
When it comes to Mr. Perdu, we do have the clinical legs to guide us toward the theory that informs the dream-within-a-dream strategy. I began this paper by suggesting that the moment that signals the end of a sense of seamless dreaming and the start of the illusion of another dream sequence must be an indication of intense, unique, unconscious psychology. What can be inferred from Mr. Perdu's analysis and the occurrence of the dream within a dream?
Following Freud's line of reasoning, can it be assumed that the memory of a most painful piece of reality began to emerge and had to be disavowed with frantic dispatch and relocated in a new setting, given that the old setting of the original dream was massively endangered by its emerging traumatic presence? The moment of “reel switching” would seem to have occurred when the dreamer was lost and a child on a bicycle was guiding him home. By switching reels at this moment and seeming to begin a new dream, the content of the first reel is being designated as “a dream within a dream,” the better to disavow the reality that had appeared too blatantly, too undisguisedly, in the dream. A piece of historic truth had threatened to challenge the soothing, sleep-enhancing narrative truth of the dream and needed to be relegated to the status of “not real” by the dream-within-dream strategy as if to insist that “it's only a dream” needed the added reinforcement “it's only a dream within a dream. How could I ever have mistaken it for reality?” Freud does not comment on the content of the subsequent dream—“the usurper dream,” so to speak—as if its meaning were insignificant, unimportant. This is a curious piece of neglect since we can be almost certain that reel two has some deeply significant relationship to reel one, no matter how fundamental the disguise might appear. Mr. Perdu goes so far as to question which piece of dream is within the other. While this Jesuitical intellectuality could be treated as characterological and is quite characteristic of his defensive maneuvers, the question nevertheless contains an insight to which he associated diligently and profitably. Mr. Perdu clearly recognized the urgency in reel one that signaled the unconscious cinematographer to switch reels, but he doubted that the content of reel two was any less significant than that of reel one, even it its raison d'ětre was indeed to displace and disguise “the reality” that reel one could not tolerate. Mr. Perdu even suggested that the content of reel two was prefigured in reel one, the terror of one re-stated in the other rather than eliminated entirely. At the moment of unconscious terror in reel one, when the panic of a lost child emerged, did the reality of the father's utter absence from Mr. Perdu's life, coupled with an intense yearning for contact with him, emerge also with such painful affect that the father (young, bearded man) and the dialogue with him had to be isolated in its own new dream surroundings, far removed from the dream dynamics that had gotten it started in the first place?
Mr. Perdu had told his young, bearded father his dreams, placed all his faith in him, even offered him the warm sexual intimacy of nocturnal enuresis, only to be rejected, abandoned, lost. This “reality,” played out in confessionals, in becoming a church “father” (priest), in analysis itself, would need to be jettisoned from waking life (even from “typical” dream life), at home only in the peculiar illusion of a usurping dream portion of a dream within a dream until the transference neurosis could make it fully acceptable in the dialogue with the analyst. What was not “told” to the father and was “told” only in confessionals with a bitter ambivalence would have to be told to an analyst who could not only tolerate intense hatred and love but cherish the act of “listening” that would engage the act of “telling,” no matter how conflicted the dialogue would become in the new therapeutic setting.
This discussion of the dream-within-a-dream process is different from Freud's (1900), Berman's (1985) and Silber's (1983) in the emphasis it places on both portions of the dream and the dynamic links between them. While Berman, comparing the dream-within-dream process to the primal scene, refers to the inner dream and the outer dream, the dynamic link between dream within dream and “usurper” dream is not spelt out. Silber, as mentioned earlier, tries to focus only on the dream-within-dream segment of his example, and Freud, as cited, did not give details of the dream within a dream, nor did he mention or place any emphasis at all on the subsequent dream (what I've been calling the usurper dream). By drawing attention to the dynamic linkage between the two portions of the dream sequence I believe that the multiple determinants of both are enriched and highlighted.
I have also suggested an analogy between the bifurcated form of the dream-within-dream strategy and other conceivable prototypes, such as childhood play, splitting and altered states of consciousness such as fugues and depersonalizations. What significance can be attached to the déjà vu feeling the awakener experienced when recounting the dream to his wife? This does suggest that the act of telling the dream to the bearded man and subsequently to the wife are “uncannily” related to the conflicted communications with father, mother, and priest, from an earlier era, conflicted childhood communications, which become repressed and unconscious, always residing “within” adult consciousness, not too dissimilar perhaps from the experience of dream within dream itself.
In that sense, the post-dream déjà vu feeling is a reprise of the dream-within-dream experience, highlighting it, accentuating its meaning, haunting the awakener with a mysterious revenant of dream-lore.