This article complements and challenges current comprehension of dreams within dreams. It identifies a need to be more rigorous regarding the essential elements and boundaries defining this concept and to provide greater contextual detail in presenting such phenomena and our work with them. Sometimes what is reported as a dream nested in a dream may be better understood as a partial or actual awakening. Dreams of all sorts provide an analytically valuable “third” that analysts and patients can contemplate, associate to, and strive to figure out collaboratively. The author concurs with those who, like Freud, continue to find these nocturnal hallucinations to be a royal road to understanding unconscious processes.
I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
In his intriguing paper, “Dreams Within Dreams,” Eugene Mahon (2002) has contributed, with considerable literary style, to the growing literature on this fascinating topic. During the termination phase of his 8-year analysis with Mr. Perdu, a 56-year-old philosophy professor, formerly a priest, who grew up in South Africa, the following dream emerged:
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
Page 53in 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 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.
Mahon believed that a crucial latent dream thought that entered this dream concerned a trauma in Perdu's childhood that he had recounted early in his analysis. As a child of 5 or 6 years, Perdu had been playing with older boys who suddenly went about their own business, forgetting the younger one who had been entrusted to their care. A kind gentleman on a bicycle rode Perdu home. In later years, whenever this incident was recalled, his mother railed against the boy to whom she had entrusted her son, taking little responsibility for her own negligence. Perdu was aware that in the dream, the bike-riding child who guided him home reversed the roles of child and adult 50 years earlier. Through intensive work with this memory over the years, they had come to understand it as a screen memory that contained and hid the greater reality of maternal and paternal neglect.
In accord with Freud's idea about dreams within dreams, Mahon reasoned that the memory of a painful piece of reality (that childhood trauma) began to surface during the dream. It had to be disavowed and located in a new setting (a dream-within-a-dream) given that the original dream setting was endangered by this emerging presence. Using the cinematographic image of “reel switching,” Mahon suggests by changing reels at that moment and seeming to begin a new dream, the content of the first reel was being designated as a dream-within-a-dream in order to disavow the reality that had appeared too undisguisedly in the dream. A piece of historic truth threatened 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 of “it's only a dream-within-a-dream. How could I ever have mistaken it for reality?”
Analyst and analysand engaged in complex discussions about which dream was internal to which. Paraphrasing Freud, Perdu commented: “One hides in a dream-within-a-dream an actual event. 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?” Contemplating his analysand's cogitations, Mahon remarked that 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, he continued, 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.
The dream-within-a-dream concept can sometimes be confusing, as the previous paragraph suggests. For a different, complementary, simpler perspective, one might approach this material from the viewpoint of partial awakenings, rather than focusing on dreams within dreams. Accenting this possibility is the main raison d'être of this article.
Mahon attends to the striking moment when Perdu thought he woke up, startled about Connecticut being unexpectedly close to Greenwich Village, only to discover later, when he actually awoke, that it all that had been a dream. Beyond that dramatic instance of illusory awakening on the road to Greenwich, consider this patient's opening, tone-setting sentence: “I awake at the sound of a car pulling into the driveway.” It was not just in the middle of the dream or at its second phase, but from the get-go, that this dream hints that it is about “waking.” In both instances, these supposed awakenings turn out to be “waking” into further dreaming. Such material challenges us, providing opportunities to explore the way states of consciousness emerge and merge.
Mahon stated that by putting trauma in one dream and “telling” someone about the trauma in a dream within it, the analysand was declaring that “telling” was as great a trauma as the trauma itself, and that the
two should not be confused. Given that both those events were framed within different sorts of alleged dream awakenings, one might see these traumas as being held in states of partial, illusory, or faint awakening rather that doubly buried by dreaming within dreaming.
Freud offered that his discipline's core concerns transference and resistance. To the (considerable) extent that his definition of his treatment method is insightful and useful, it underscores the importance of coming to comprehend our transferences so that we can perceive reality closer to what it is, as opposed to what we impose upon it in terms of our organizing principles, defenses, etc. In successful analyses, we emerge from somewhat dreamlike states into something closer to actuality. This can be seen as awakening, or even rebirth (Willock, 2017). For Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou (cited in the epigraph above), the supreme goal in life is to experience the Great Awakening after which one is aware that all that preceded had been, in a sense, a dream.
Perdu's dream arose during analytic termination—a time when the dialectic between dreaming and awakening may be especially relevant and intense. Just as birth represents a dramatic ending of long pregnancy, so can treatment termination resemble the conclusion of a lengthy gestation that may be premature or full-term, yielding a new being that is healthy or handicapped. This birthing process can constitute a crisis composed, as the ancient Chinese said, of danger and opportunity. In this regard, Perdu's dream can be seen as an example of a life crisis dream (Akeret, 2019). Working long and intensively with this material in relation to the transference and Perdu's relational past awakened powerful affects and productive realizations.
Perdu believed he woke up, realized he had been dreaming about being on the road to Greenwich Village, then went on to discuss his earlier dream with someone like Freud. When he actually awoke, he realized that his earlier ‘awakening’ had been illusory. A different or complementary hypothesis would be that his mid-dream awakening was not entirely an illusion. It could be contemplated instead as a partial awakening, a moment of increased lucidity.
Yadin (2021) described such qualities of awareness and reflection as “the inner voice in dreams.” He related this phenomenon to lucid dreaming—a way of waking in a dream, but not fully. In the lucid state, we continue to dream, with awareness of being both awake and asleep. In discussing Yadin's contribution, Willock (2021) noted that lucid dreamers often prize not only being aware that they are dreaming but also being able to influence oneiric events. This latter aspect of lucidity resonates with Freud's idea of wish fulfilment being the essence of dreams.
From the perspective of partial awakening, Perdu may not have been wrong to have believed he awoke, though he did not realize that this coming into awareness was only partial. He may have been more awake than he had been, but he was not fully awake.
The term, partial awakening, captures an important aspect of what Perdu may have experienced. There are no references to this phenomenon in the vast PEP Web archive of psychoanalytic articles. In other literatures, this phrase is used to indicate states of arousal between sleep stages that may be characterized by disorientation, sleep talking, and other phenomena. Dream researchers also discuss false awakenings, often related to incorrectly believing that one has woken to shower, eat breakfast, begin the working day, etc. There are no references to false awakening in the PEP web archive. Dr. Mahon's article furnishes us an opportunity to explore and refine our understanding of these neglected matters.
Neuroscientist Patrick McNamara (2019) notes that transitions between REM, NREM, and waking states are virtually always partial and incomplete, leading to hybrids of REM and waking, NREM and waking, or REM with NREM. When these mixed conditions occur, we can have uncanny, weird, and bizarre experiences.
McNamara believes that when we falsely think we have woken but are, in fact, still dreaming, our brain is moving towards wakefulness and, for some reason, thinks it has arrived. He suggested that if some degree of activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the standard physiological cue that the brain uses to think it is awake, then it is reasonable to argue that this clue can sometimes be interpreted incorrectly.
He considers, as I have above, that dreaming within a dream may be more like lucid dreaming that results from a hybrid of REM and waking states. When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is activated during REM, the individual gains some awareness of self and so becomes aware that he is dreaming.
False awakenings involve skipping the awareness of oneself as dreaming that characterizes lucid dreaming. Instead, the awakening process would discontinue, and the individual would carry on dreaming.
“But why dream about normal morning rituals and awake activities? We do not know the answer to this question.” Contemplating McNamara's query, I would suggest those false awakenings are “dreams of convenience” (Freud, 1900). A key function of dreams, Freud (1901) emphasized, is to ensure we get sufficient restorative sleep. Dreams are “the guardians of sleep” (p. 678). Sometimes we know we must get up, but we dearly want to continue slumbering. We therefore dream that we are doing all those necessary activities of daily living, permitting us to carry on sleeping.
In the 1950s, researchers at the University of Chicago discovered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. It was also referred to as paradoxical sleep (or para sleep) because there is such active, complex brain and experiential activity happening during what is otherwise a passive, dormant state. Inherent to the paradox of dreaming is electroencephalographic and experiential ambiguity as to whether one is asleep or awake. In dreams like Perdu's, this ambiguity is elevated significantly, providing an opportunity for reflecting on the nature of dreaming, wakefulness, and mixed states.
Our capacity to differentiate between being asleep/dreaming versus awake/thinking is not always reliable. Recently I attended a clinical presentation where an analyst said her patient presented interesting material that was not a dream. To me, the analysand's report sounded exactly like a dream. It was replete with elements that, from a reality perspective, were improbable or impossible but, in dream mentation, would not be uncommon or out of place. When I remarked on how dreamlike that material seemed, the analyst responded that she, and even her patient, as they discussed the material further, were not completely sure it had not been a dream.
We do not always know when we are awake as opposed to sleeping. Psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and other scientist-practitioners have contributed enormously to the growing field of research and practice often referred to as sleep medicine. They discuss such discernment difficulties with terms like: parasomnia; paradoxical insomnia (when one thinks one had little or no sleep but observers record that this was not so); microsleep (brief bursts of sleep that happen while a person is awake—often while their eyes are open and they are sitting upright, or even performing a task, such as driving a car or truck. Parts of the brain go offline for a few seconds while the rest stays awake).
Little Hans (Freud, 1909) insisted that his “thoughts” about the plumber coming to unscrew the bathtub and, some days later, returning to remove Hans's “behind and penis,” were not dreams. Children can have difficulty differentiating between dreams and reality, let alone between dreams and thoughts. A preadolescent told me he used to have a recurring dream where his father came to his bed at night and led him downstairs, then turned him over to a witch. I asked him if he told his parents about this terrifying, repetitive dream. “No. I didn't know it was a dream,” he responded. Adults, too, can experience difficulties discriminating between dream and reality.
The sleep-medicine literature contains numerous examples of complex confusion when one is simultaneously awake and asleep. For example, one renowned exemplar of that discipline, Dr. Carlos Schenck, noted: “This man may not always be waking up from sleep, but may actually at times be waking up from a dream-within-a-dream. Sometimes he may simultaneously wake up from sleep, his dream, and his dream-within-a-dream. Complicated shifts in an uncertain, fluctuating realm of sleep, dreams, and weird awakenings” (2007, p. 112).
Para means beyond or outside; somnia means sleep. Parasomnia is, therefore, any phenomena that is related to sleep but exceeds the boundaries of its more usual forms (e.g., sleepwalking). One might think of Perdu's “awakening” as a parasomnia moment. For extended discussion of these simultaneous sleep/wake states containing many fascinating illustrations, see Willock (2018, 2022).
Mahon sees Perdu's illusory awakening and subsequent dream-within-a-dream as raising important issues for the psychology of dreaming. I agree. Sleep specialists have provided many examples of patients whose nightly brainwave patterns mix typical sleep and awake electrical activity. These neurophysiological patterns make them more prone to parasomnia. We have no reason to believe Perdu had regular, simultaneous sleep/wake moments. The question therefore arises as to what might have caused this state for him during this particular dream?
Perdu believed he awoke because he was so surprised to “realize” that Connecticut and New York City were so close. This “realization” might be a manic defense against the painful reality of separation and loss associated with termination of his analysis. Manic denial of this trauma might have been sufficiently exciting that it led to arousal—a heightening of consciousness—a minor disruption of normal sleep and dreaming balanced by a prevailing wish to preserve restorative sleep and dreaming. The alternative to this brief manic defense and the ensuing moment of lucidity (partial awakening) might have been a bad dream or nightmare in relation to the trauma Mahon identified and, consequently, more serious sleep disruption.
Having partially awoken and regained his bearings, Perdu could then settle back into his dream and proceed along the royal road he was constructing to reunite with his Freudian analyst in Greenwich Village. In this complementary interpretation, emphasis is on shifting states of consciousness and partial awakening in an ongoing sleep/dream process and less on the idea of needing to construct a psychic envelope to defensively isolate a dream-within-a-dream. This alteration in accent is not to negate Mahon's reasoning but to supplement it in what I believe to be important ways in our collective efforts to navigate the regal route toward comprehending unconscious processes. One could debate whether it is truer to the data and more useful in any particular instance to speak of partial awakening and/or dreaming within a dream. Such lively discussion between competing or complementing perspectives is integral to comparative-integrative psychoanalysis (Willock, 2007).
Later, we will delve deeper into other factors relevant to the important question of what may have caused Perdu to have the illusion of awakening in the middle of his dream.
According to Mahon, “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 (p. 123).
The richly detailed dream, associations, reflections, and interpretations presented by Mahon implicitly invite readers to participate in “dreaming” this dream, associating to it, pondering its nature, in continuing reverie. I would like to accept this tacit invitation, extending what I have already proposed in ways that might shift the emphasis in understanding in some interesting ways.
Perdu commences his dream report: “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.” Instead of, or in addition to this child being the desired offspring of Perdu and his analyst/parent, as in Mahon's main interpretation, might this youngster reflect Perdu's feeling “dropped” by his analyst in an odd, “unexpected,” untimely manner, as their termination process proceeds? This dropping off can be seen as birth and abandonment—an event and a “crime” committed under the shadow of darkness. Having been ejected from his
residence in Mahon's consulting room to his actual home, henceforth Perdu will have to be the principal parent and analyst for his child self. It would hardly be surprising that he might feel challenged, lost, disoriented, and in need of help with this overwhelming project.
In addition to the day/night reversal of the usual time for dropping off a child at nursery school (but not an unusual time for birthing), and the adult/child bike rider reversal, there are other turnarounds in this dream. For example, regarding this drop-off as premature birth from psychoanalysis, there is a foetus/child switch. This newborn has advanced locomotor and cognitive functions. Its “maturity” resembles the way many nonhuman animals can stand and walk immediately after birth. If one must be prematurely born from analysis, better to emerge as child than baby. A youngster able to ride a bike is capable of achieving and sustaining balance, having no doubt endured many falls, frights, and near misses on the developmental path of learning to master this and other means of traversing distances and accomplishing developmental challenges. Such a child has many more capacities for handling this new discontinuity than does any infant. Condensing newborn and youngster prefigures the later significant compression of distance between Connecticut and Greenwich Village.
In yet another reversal, Perdu might prefer to be going into the womb (home) rather than being born into the world. Analogously, he might rather go back to his analysis as opposed to being untimely ripped from it, returned in confusion to Connecticut. This dream is much about reversals, including switches between states of sleep, dreaming, and wakefulness.
With the arrival of the child, the dream scene changes slightly but significantly. “I am now outside my house but lost, trying to find my bearings.” Such disorientation might well be the case after birth, especially a premature, traumatic one (Willock, 2015). Having been ejected (and/or having ejected himself) from his analysis, Perdu finds himself in a confusional state. Consider Winnicott's (1971) profound insights on such conditions caused by separation, initially from mother:
Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a break in life's continuity, so that primitive defenses now become organized to defend
Page 62against a repetition of “unthinkable anxiety” or a return of the acute confusional state that belongs to disintegration of nascent ego structure. We must assume that the vast majority of babies never experience the x+y+z quantity of deprivation. This means that the majority of children do not carry around with them for life the knowledge from experience of having been mad. Madness here simply means a break-up of whatever may exist at the time of a personal continuity of existence. After ‘recovery’ from x+y+z deprivation a baby has to start again permanently deprived of the root which could provide continuity with the personal beginning (p. 97).
Ogden (1989) refers to such breaches in root continuity as autistic-contiguous disruption. These gaps must be repaired rapidly, by any means, realistic or phantastic.
“A child on a bicycle guides me home.” As if on magical cue, Perdu's more competent, central, observing ego arrives to help resolve his frightening state of mind (“to defend against a repetition of ‘unthinkable anxiety’ or a return of the acute confusional state that belongs to disintegration of nascent ego structure”). This rapid rescue operation is momentarily successful but evidently does not fully restore the desired self-state in a lasting manner. A more potent intervention is felt to be needed.
Soon this additional operation arrives to accomplish the desired undoing and reversal of Perdu's separation from his analyst and the history of traumatic losses it symbolizes. “Then I walk from my house in Connecticut to Greenwich Village, which in dream geography seems no more than a hundred yards.” The dream succeeds in magically denying the geographical and emotional distance that this “premature” separation from his analyst involves. Disrupted contiguity is restored.
Mahon notes that “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.” It is also noteworthy that the final syllable in Connecticut is ‘cut’, a word suitable for evoking the traumatic separation of ‘birth’ with which Perdu is struggling. Furthermore, termination can be seen as a “Mean Time.” It also confronts one with the challenge of what to do in the Meantime—between the decision to terminate
and the challenging accomplishment of that goal in external, objective, Greenwich time, and in the internal world of unconscious timelessness.
“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.” Freud (1900) believed wood symbolizes mother. Wood is material (from Latin ‘mater’ = mother). Wood = mother/matrix/womb. Birth trauma (Reik, 1924; ; Willock, 2014) is symbolically undone as Perdu re-enters a tastefully wood-paneled (womb-like) enclosure.
“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.” Perdu's agonizing separation from his analyst has been reversed, perhaps even more than undone. He has found/created an uber analyst, younger and more like the bearded, founding genius of the discipline than his actual, unbearded analyst.
Mahon emphasized the centrality of Perdu's not having been able to discuss feelings, especially overwhelming ones, with his parents. “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, Perdu commented bitterly: ‘The warm flow of my intimacy was lost on him.’” Nocturnal urination could reflect not only intimacy but also anxiety and aggression. These other issues may also have found little place for processing with Perdu's father.
Given the slight “parasomnia” element in Perdu's adult dream, childhood urinary incontinence in the context of another bad dream is of interest. It is a minor parasomnia, a developmentally common instance in which something akin to what Freud (1900) called “access to motility” was not securely shut down during sleep due to neurological immaturity and possibly other reasons. In contrast, in Perdu's adult dream, motility was safely contained within his dream sequence despite, or perhaps partly because of, his minor parasomnia.
Although the distance between father and son was “never redressed,” it was addressed in Perdu's analysis generally, and in this dream specifically. Whereas things did not go so well after a bad dream when Perdu slept with his father, they unfolded much more happily when he brought his disorienting adult dream to a Freud-like figure. That professional was well-suited to fit Perdu's wishes to have an idealized father/analyst, and to accept a decent, helpful, flawed doctor friend (Fleiss) who resembled his real analyst, and all other human beings, who inevitably possess both strengths and weaknesses. Like Freud relying on Fleiss as confidant, Perdu might have to find a post-analytic, Fleiss-type friend when he would no longer be able to take his dreams and other concerns to Dr. Mahon. In his dream, he found this figure or at least a premonition of him.
With respect to the trauma of telling, Mahon noted that much of Perdu's analysis concerned repairing his capacity to communicate. “If the breast is the first curriculum, baby talk is the first dialogue.” With this metaphor, Mahon hinted that his analysand's difficulties were of very early origin. An earlier, even more fundamental curriculum is provided in the womb. In that classwomb, the curriculum is pre-babytalk. The movement from the first to the final scene in Perdu's dream captures the transition from preverbal to verbal. The nonverbal, first act emphasizes feelings, events (Fast, 1985), and sensations (sound of a car; pitch dark). Surprising things happen (child dropped off). Perdu finds himself outside, lost, struggling to find his bearings. Between uterus and breast, he is not yet in the promised land. There are miles to go before he sleeps. Vehicles (bike) and roads are required. They soon arrive, in tolerable dosage. Blessedly, it turns out that the land of milk and honey is but “a stone's throw” away. That phrase reminds me of Freud's (1920) grandson taking control of his mother's leavings by symbolically throwing her away in the form of various objects and, eventually, a spool attached to a string. For a long time, that toddler's emphasis was on fort (gone!). Only in later play was da (there!, i.e., reunion) achieved. In much shorter dreamtime, Perdu proceeded from disorientation through fort (“a stone's throw”) to da (ah).
When discussing the breast as first curriculum, Mahon noted that developmental achievement cannot be sustained without some early object constancy. I would add that acquiring object constancy is made
more difficult if there are earlier disruptions to autistic-contiguity that can commence in the perinatal period. This is the realm of pre-object constancy—the domain of self-constancy, self-continuity and, when things go wrong, self-disintegration.
Like the road from Connecticut to Greenwich, the path from pre- to fuller object constancy requires sensitive dosing of distance (time between separations). If the breast does not appear in a timely manner, Freud said, one must hallucinate it. In this magical manner, the Greenwich breast became miraculously close at hand and reachable.
If mother is away for x minutes, Winnicott (1971) wrote, it is not a major problem. If she is away for x + y minutes, the distress can still be repaired if she knows how to accomplish that. If mother is absent for x + y + z minutes, the damage is (I would say “may be”) irreparable. The child must institute emergency defenses. Perdu called upon his hallucinatory superpowers to bridge an otherwise unbearable chasm.
Mahon and Perdu put considerable emphasis on core Freudian principles (wish fulfillment, superego retaliation, defense, etc.). For example:
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” (p.125).
Those classical ideas were probably very useful in Perdu's analysis. Here I would like to add a complementary emphasis highlighting some other dream functions and processes. From this perspective, Perdu's 3-part
dream begins with at least some important elements that are “beyond the pleasure principle” (Freud, 1920)—birth, alienation from home/womb, abandonment, and disruption of autistic-contiguity. This dream phase addresses trauma and associated repetition compulsion. This endeavor may not only be automatic (PTSD) but also actively instigated as part of a search for self-saving and mastery related to prior trauma and current triggering of those ancient wounds.
An element of wish fulfillment—assisted reunion with a not so secure home base—is introduced into this trauma-based dream. In the adult/child reversal, the child becomes father to the man (Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up). This bike-riding youngster assists with affect regulation by guiding the disoriented adult back to safety. Perdu may have imagined much might have been different if only he had had the capacity when he was a child to parent his parents (cf., Ferenczi's [1949] dream of the “wise baby”), to guide them from disorientation and danger to safety.
The dream pointed to what was needed back in the day. This relatively reality-oriented narrative of dream Part 1 could not fully contain and process Perdu's triggered traumatic past. Something additional was now necessary. More magical thinking was required to at least create an illusion of closing the traumatic gap. Home alone was too lonely. A more robust, restorative, relational residence was desired. Perdu had to rapidly and radically reduce the distance between himself and his analyst, or post-analyst friend/Fleiss. His manic want (I meant to type “wand”) collapsed many miles into mere yards. This glorious defeat of the dragon of distance was so exciting that it jolted him into a semi-awake state—alert enough to realize he had been dreaming, but not awake enough to spoil his slumber.
This manic or post-manic, aware, reflective state likely enabled Perdu to experience and appreciate the marvels of imagination. In reality, he will terminate his daily visits with his analyst, but in psychic reality there need be no substantial separation. In the timelessness (and relative spacelessness) of the dreaming mind, he can reunite with his analyst who has become an evolving internal object, a resource Perdu now carries within himself as a presence potentially available at all times. This need-satisfying, increasingly constant object is being further solidified in the service of dream functions emphasized by self psychologists (e.g.,
Fosshage, 1983) that include restoring, preserving, and growing the self. Perdu is proceeding well on Margaret Mahler's final separation-individuation phase, namely, “on the [royal] road to object constancy.”
In this 3-part sequence, Perdu proceeds from a trauma-based dream with important added elements of wish-fulfillment, to slightly (hypo) manic wish-fulfillment leavened with partial awakening and realization of the power, weirdness, and wonders of imagination, to a realistic future plan for moving along the regal road from Freud to Friend (from Freudian psychoanalyst to Fleiss). In that new or renewed companion, he will find many of the wonderful qualities facilitating and promoting dialogue that he found in Freud (academically) and in his actual analyst, Mahon.
Earlier I began addressing Mahon's important question about what stimulated Perdu's dream-within-a-dream or, as I emphasize, his partial awakening. I talked of arousal related to desperately needed manic defense. Most or all psychic functions can be used for either self-protective or growth-facilitating purposes. With respect to the latter, Perdu's mania might be regarded as introducing a necessary element of stimulating magic realism into his narrative—a respectable literary device. The road to Greenwich is many miles long but one can, via the power of imagination, reduce it to a short distance that can be easily traversed. In psychic reality, one can access the inaccessible. Initially there may be some manic defense at work, but partial awakening transforms defense into adaptation, contributing to revelation and wisdom.
In the title of an important article, Grotstein raised the crucial question: Who is the dreamer who dreams the dream and who is the dreamer who understands it? Elaborating on Grotstein's and McDougall's (1985) ideas on how dreams require set designers, choreographers, scriptwriters, location scouts, costume designers, actors, and many other talents, I described this assemblage of subselves as the Dream Team (Willock, 2021). This intelligent, competent, coordinated group has a receptive audience in mind, namely the dreamer who watches and understands the play in which he has also been recruited to be usually the main, and also the auxiliary actors.
“Every dream has an arousing effect” (Freud, 1900, p. 575). The self that observes the dream and derives benefit from it may sometimes need to be even more “wide awake” than usual in order to fully register and ponder the importance of the play s/he is watching. This necessary arousal may require the illusion of actually being awake to help not only grasp the dream and contemplate it but also to preserve it in memory for future exploration with one's analyst, friend, or self—in keeping with Khan's (1962) definition of the “good dream.”
Mahon underscored that the dream-within-a-dream treatment of Perdu's childhood trauma that had been so much explored, now seemed to generate new affects, and more intense memory. It may have been more the partial awakening, rather than a dream-within-a-dream, that promoted these new feelings, intensified memory, and therapeutic benefit.
“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!” This perplexity and frustration aligned with the analytic dyad's focus on the idea that dreams within dreams mean that something especially painful is being doubly distanced. From the perspective of partial awakening, the reappearance of this material was not so much indicative of it having to be intensely disavowed (though that is true) but rather to signal that it needed to be faced and worked with some more and that this could be usefully accomplished or commenced in a dream assisted and fortified by partial awakening.
This difference in viewpoint concerning partial awakening versus dream-within-dream mirrors the sometimes vociferous debate in the literature as to whether dreams mainly conceal or reveal. Protagonists have at times preferred extreme polar positions. Comparative-integrative psychoanalysis, aimed at separating the wheat from the chaff in all positions, and exploring to what extent a both/and rather than an either/or perspective might be viable, would suggest that neither polarized assertion may be comprehensively true. Both concealment and revelation can manifest in any dream and in any dream element.
In naming his analysand Mr. Perdu, Mahon may have wanted to underscore the central importance of loss in Perdu's life and psyche. I imagine he might have thought of this French word in relation to its prominence in the famous title of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It is not only time, but also opportunities that are lost—the what might have beens but only for what failed to happen, or happened instead. Perdu's dream demonstrates that these losses can be revisited and a process of reparation can be commenced in dreams and, later, be continued in waking life. This beneficial transition from dreaming to waking life may be facilitated by dreaming one is awake.
This search for lost time (and lost relationships, experiences, and opportunities) can be another important function of dreaming. Like the unbidden memories that came to Proust, dreams are a venue in which consciously unbidden experiences arise for our contemplation, processing, and potential benefit. An alternative name for Mr. Perdu could be Monsieur Recherche (Mr. Research, Mr. Searcher). This moniker would put the emphasis on Perdu's creative response to the trauma of loss rather than on his retraumatization.
Khan's (1962) “good dream” incorporates an unconscious wish that enables sleep to be sustained and, upon awakening, is available for processing. When early satisfactions have been unreliable, the capacity to use “mnemic images of satisfaction” (Khan, p.28) to mobilize dream-wishes is lacking or distorted. In contrast, a good dream indicates “a psychic capacity … the dream increment of ego-strength” (p. 25) on which analytic work depends. When this function is disturbed by ego-distortions, primitive defenses, or psychotic anxieties, one tends to act out in harmful ways. In Perdu's dream, he demonstrates his evolving capacity to mobilize wishes to self-right (Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage, 2011) in the face of disorienting separation. Rather than having to actually awaken to process this dream, he is felicitously able to bring it to an internalized analyst while still sleeping. Later, he can continue processing this remarkable phantasy during the daytime with his wife, real analyst, and perhaps others (e.g., a Fleiss-like friend).
When I ponder what Perdu has lost and seeks, his nocturnal reverie brings to me, unbidden, John Denver's beautiful song, Take Me Home,
Country Roads. Perdu might sing: “Take me home, Connecticut Roads. Take me home to the place I belong.” His psychic residence is becoming a relational matrix where he feels increasingly at home. It combines Connecticut/Greenwich Village/Johannesburg, past/present/future, and being lost/found/revitalized.
In my effort to participate in Perdu's dream, Jung's ideas about subjective and objective levels of interpretation were valuable background concepts. Mahon mostly saw the child as a dropped-off baby that Perdu conceived/wished to bear in a primal scene derivative with his analyst. In contrast, on Jung's subjective level, that child would not be an object, but rather a subject, namely Perdu himself, being abandoned.
The competent, bike-riding youngster could also be Ferenczi's (1923) “wise baby.” While an adult Perdu floundered, this young one, sage and talented beyond his years, could easily understand what was needed to save the day. A sapient part of himself like this could help contain Perdu's anxieties as he approached his post-analytic, self-analysis.
There are limits to the wisdom and power of infants. The reality of these shortcomings must sometimes be buttressed by manic magic. Klein (1935, 1940) originally referred to this omnipotent stance as the Manic Position, designed to defend against Depressive anxieties like separation, dependency, vulnerability, and loss. From a neo-Kleinian perspective, I would add that mania can be called upon to transcend, or at least provide a wild, comforting illusion or delusion of overcoming the earliest anxieties of the Autistic-Contiguous Position.
Jung anticipated Kohut's self-state dreams, seeing these nocturnal hallucinations as “spontaneous self-portrayal in symbolical form of the actual situation in the unconscious” (Jung, 1916, p.263). In the British Object Relational tradition, Fairbairn pushed beyond this useful snapshot or x-ray perspective in his idea of dreams as struggles to not only depict but also to work through and progress beyond object relational dilemmas. Perdu's dream provides a fine illustration of a dreamer doing just that.
The prospective function of dreams (Jung, 1916) involves an unconscious, anticipatory, guiding function pointing consciousness toward
a better path. This purposive function differs from Freud's idea of the unconscious as a repository of unacceptable, repressed infantile wishes seeking covert gratification. Jung's unconscious is an autonomous, intelligent, creative agent, selecting apt images for developmental purposes. From this perspective, Perdu's dream may be serving to guide him toward further actualizing his imaginative and self-analytic functions, and turning to others for intimate dialogue, promoting object constancy, continuing resolution of old trauma, and growth.
Kleinian analyst Hanna Segal (2018) described predictive dreams that are designed to expel beta elements (Bion, 1962) rather than processing and benefiting from them. Events from a predictive dream are soon enacted in one's analysis with the aim of dumping, rather than exploring them. Purdu's dream could be seen as a predictive one that foreshadowed sharing it with his analyst in waking life that was healthily aimed not at expulsion but at growth-oriented investigation.
Self-psychologist Marian Tolpin (2002) emphasized the coexistence of trailing and leading edges in dreams and other psychic phenomena. Perdu provides a good illustration of these opposite thrusts. Early on, his dream grapples with a trailing edge—processing separation from his analyst via images that evoke past separation trauma. He adds increasing amounts of wish fulfillment, proceeding from relatively simple, symbolic forms of that to slightly more manic versions. At that point, he puts on his psychic brakes, shaking himself into a partially awake state, to reflect on his experience and process it. Having effected that settling, grounding function, achieving a contemplative position, he proceeds to the leading edge of his dream, envisioning beneficial post-analytic relationships and productive dialogue with his internal analyst.
These brief references to Jung, Klein, British Object Relations, Self Psychology, and a neoKleinian framework (Ogden) illustrate the value of a comparative-integrative approach to psychoanalysis. Any or all of these approaches, and others (e.g., Interpersonal and Relational psychoanalysis) are valuable in themselves. We massively augment the utility of single approaches when we are open to engaging with the multiple perspectives available to us.
Whereas Mahon emphasized oedipal wishes, resulting superego punishment, and defenses, I pondered Perdu's possibly more primary preoccupation with earlier issues concerning separation. Might comparative-integrative psychoanalysis envision more than additive validity to these perspectives?
Fairbairn (1944), then Guntrip (1969) regarded neuroses as defenses against earlier schizoid anxieties. This may not be as universally true as they believed, but it can sometimes be the case. Kohut later articulated a related idea, namely, that oedipal pathology only arises when there is pre-existing self/selfobject pathology. From these viewpoints, Mahon's interpretation that Perdu wanted to conceive a baby with his analyst/parents, could be seen as manic denial of categorical differences (boundaries), in this instance between sexes and generations. In this worldview in which anything is possible, there are no frustrating separations, distances, impossibilities. Despite being a child, and male, he can conceive a baby with his parents. Here he has conveniently obliterated the first phase of Mahler's separation-individuation journey—differentiation. Symbiotic undifferentiation (dedifferentiation) prevails, when needed. Greenwich Mean Time succumbs to timespacelessness.
Mahon wrote that Perdu's reading of Freud was deep and well integrated into his overall philosophical knowledge, and was a factor that could serve as resistance at times. It seems Perdu could draw on the intricacies of oedipal theory, not only for creative enlightenment, but also to defend against more fundamental anxieties stimulated by termination.
Occam's Razor is a principle of theory construction or evaluation according to which, other things being equal, explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are preferred to explanations that posit more entities and assumptions. In laypersons' terms, the most economical (simple) theory is often best.
Following that guiding heuristic, named after a misspelling of William of Ockham, a brilliant medieval philosopher, logician, and theologian, the idea of partial awakening in Perdu's dream might be more economical than more complicated, perhaps confusing, contemplation of dreams
within dreams, leading to questions as to which dream is within which dream, and so forth.
Rather than Perdu's dream being mostly about the need to sequester traumatic recollections that refuse to go away, one might emphasize more his desire to comprehend current stress on its own terms, and in relation to past trauma, for the purpose of growth rather than simply survival.
If one had to choose between sources of anxiety, the first step in Freud's (1926) famous anxiety series (loss of the object) might be in some ways even more important (foundational) than subsequent phallic-oedipal issues (loss of part of the body, etc.). Contemporary triggers and adaptive context (Langs, 1973) challenges might sometimes be even more important, or more productively explored, than related past trauma. Comparative-integrative analysis by multiple psychoanalysts might profitably consider how these multiple factors and viewpoints challenge and enrich our evolving understanding of this fascinating material.
Given that Professor Perdu reads at least classical psychoanalysis (Freud), he might encounter this article. If so, some ideas in it might stimulate productive dialogue between him and his now internalized, evolving analyst (Mahon/Freud).
Berman's (1985) patient shared the following dream(s):
I'm in bed with J (her boyfriend). He's caressing my vagina and it feels very exciting. Then I feel another hand there; I think it belongs to M (her son). I wake up, terrified, and I'm in the bedroom with J. I demand to know if that was M's hand. He answers evasively. Then M walks into the bedroom and I scream at him to get out (p. 75).
In her associations, this patient referred to her inner and outer dreams. (Readers might be interested in knowing whether these terms were common parlance in this analytic dyad, or relatively unprecedented.) The inner dream painfully recalled interpretations Berman had made about her seductive behaviour toward her son: how shocked and guilty it made
her feel to consider having sexual feelings toward him, and how angry she felt at Berman for pointing it out. The outer dream reminded her of a family party she attended the night before with her boyfriend and her son. She had become a little drunk and was sitting on her boyfriend's lap while her son watched TV in the next room. She teasingly told her boyfriend that she could never understand what he and her son found so exciting about watching football on television. In the process of telling him this she slipped and called him by the name of a former boyfriend and was concerned that this would make him jealous.
Berman interpreted her dream in the form of a reconstruction: that it expressed her feelings as a child “outside” her parent's bedroom, filled with excitement and jealousy, and wishing to participate on the “inside.” He further suggested that her anger with her son reflected her parents' attitude toward her childhood sexual curiosity that had become incorporated as her own attitude.
The patient was able to accept this interpretation with less defensiveness and more thoughtful reflection than before. In subsequent sessions, she produced further associations to the dream. The other hand caressing her vagina reminded her of masturbating as a child; feeling guilty, and fearing that mother would detect the offensive odour on her fingers. The analytic couple linked this with the observational quality of her adolescent and adult fantasies, postulating that her childhood masturbation served to discharge primal scene excitement.
Rather than understanding Berman's patient having an outer and an inner dream, I would see her one dream as having begun as a wish-fulfilling (sexual) dream. It then touched upon a traumatic area (incest), analogous to Mahon's description of his patient having contacted past/continuing trauma in his dream. This traumatic activation pushed Berman's patient ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ (Freud, 1923). That is, rather than continuing in keeping with Freud's first theory of dreaming (wish fulfillment), the dreamwork shifted to dealing with overwhelming experience (impingement) in keeping Freud's second theory of dreaming (trauma mastery).
The possibility of her son stroking her genitals shocked Berman's patient into a hyperalert state. Having touched trauma, she ‘wakes’. ‘Waking’
reduces the frightening intensity of the previous experience: she realizes it was just a dream. She may now be a bit more awake, including neuro-physiologically, but she is still dreaming. As in parasomnia, she may be simultaneously awake and asleep/dreaming, with the accent on the latter state. She has ‘woken’ into a continuing dream. ‘Weird awakenings’ indeed, as Schenck (and McNamara) described these incomplete state shifts.
This dream change differs significantly from nightmares from which we are usually jolted wide awake, thanks to Freud's (1900) ‘night watchman’ who extricates us from what he has determined is too much overwhelming material for us to go on dreaming. This patient's nocturnal protector is more nuanced and sophisticated than Freud may have imagined. Hiss sensitivity and talents go beyond what Freud discussed. He allows Berman's patient to obtain the relief of feeling she has woken up from just a dream and to continue obtaining necessary restorative sleep, and further dream the disturbing material. The skill of this nocturnal guardian helps us develop Freud's night watchman concept in interesting, useful ways.
This patient's experience could be seen as a dream within a dream. Alternatively, it could be viewed simply as a continuation of the original dream in a slightly (necessarily) adaptively altered state of consciousness. These descriptions of these processes might be viewed as complementary. Dream within a dream has an appealing, poetic quality. My description may be more precise and provide a better, fuller description of what may be happening, and why (the adaptive functions of these dream/sleep processes).
Commenting on Berman's patient's dream, Balter wrote: “This dream depicts a nested dream in statu nascendi. The dream work made the initial (sexual) events in the containing dream retrospectively into a nested dream” (p.668). Rather than accenting this dream having been transformed after the fact into a dream-within-a-dream, I would be inclined to regard the original dream as continuing, not seamlessly, in a new key. Rather than one part of the dream containing the other part, they are simply sequential. Both parts of the dream are contained in a single phase of REM sleep. There might be some very minor alteration
in an electroencephalographic recording of that dream period indicating brief, slight, partial awakening in the context of that REM dreaming.
Silber's patient (1983) reported the following dream:
I go to group therapy and David B. is the therapist. He looks stronger than he does in real life. I feel anxious about revealing my feelings in the group. I want to talk about the dream I'd had that night—in the dream David's wife, Martha, tickled me. Then I begin to get feelings about this therapy being second best because it is in a group and not one to one.
This dream took place while the patient was struggling with feelings about being part of a church discussion group led by David B.
Like Mahon's example, Silber's dream emerged in the final phase of the analysis. Could it be that such dreams might be more likely to arise during that stage, perhaps because analysands are grappling with the challenge of henceforth needing to bring dreams and other material to someone other than their analyst? Silber's patient feared she would be discussing her dream with a practitioner of what she viewed as a second-rate modality, group therapy. On the other hand, she “upgraded” him from being leader of a discussion group to being her group therapist, someone at home and in the role of emotional helper. As part of this elevation, she noted that he looked “stronger than he does in real life.” In contrast, Mahon's analysand envisaged unambivalent upgrade—all the way to young Freud himself. Both patients were struggling with whether their post-analytic confidants and internal analysts would be better or worse than the analysts they were losing.
I would like to know whether Silber's analysand actually had the dream about David's wife tickling her. If so, was it immediately before the group therapy dream? Did she wake up in actuality, or phantasy, and remember the dream before falling back to sleep to continue it? In any case, there is at least a sort of dream-within-a-dream here, even if we do not know if and when it may have actually occurred. These are important details.
Harris (2002) reports that an artist, G, told her that after the murderous assault on the World Trade Center, her patient's child appeared one morning to tell her:
that in her dream she woke up and went to the window and another building was falling. There are dreams within dreams in which this child reports conviction and knowledge. G thinks of the dream as a wish to join her parents in what they jointly know, what binds them as a family with this new shared history (p. 465).
Harris referred to this child's convincing dreams within dreams. It would be interesting to know more about this youngster's history of such dreams. In this particular instance, I would tend to accent this as a child reporting to her mother a frightening dream, and minimize the dream-within-a-dream aspect, as Harris seems to have done. The child's mother reacted to it as a dream (not emphasizing a dream nested in another dream). It would, of course, be interesting to know what the dream had been prior to this child ‘waking’ up, then going to the window to observe another building falling. In the meantime, I would be inclined to see this as a single dream that switched into a new key, featuring a feeling of being awake, much like Berman's (and Mahon's) patient's dream. Given that this dream related to the murdering of multitudes in the 9/11 attack on New York City's World Trade Center, one can imagine the nightwatchman deciding G's daughter must not continue relaxedly asleep but, rather, must be ‘awake’ and observing the catastrophe from a distance rather than being passively lying down and perhaps at the very heart of the disaster. This girl was able to continue obtaining the sleep she needed and was ‘awake’ enough to be relatively safe and able to recall the dream in the morning and bring it to her mother for further alphabetizing.
Mahon summarized the sparse literature on dreams within dreams by remarking that it rarely went beyond what Freud had to say on this matter in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud devoted a mere paragraph to this topic. In decades of subsequent writing, he never said anything further about this matter. More precision in our depictions of dreams within dreams and greater conceptual rigor, and provision of contextual detail, would be highly desirable for creating a cumulative body of investigation concerning this captivating subject.
Dreams offer us a valuable third that patients and analysts can
contemplate together. At other times, we attend to analysands' reports of their experience and may sometimes find ourselves in difficult transference/countertransference experiences or enactments that can be challenging, for one or both parties, to regard with optimal objectivity. Patients may accuse us of having done something bad, or failing to do something good. In either case, charged ambiences can make it difficult to preserve a more contemplative, rational, dialogic atmosphere. In contrast, working with patients' dreams can be more like discussing and associating to works of art, like paintings, poems, or films. Analyst and analysand can enjoy trying to understand peculiarities and unrealistic features in dreams, combining multiple insights, cherishing what light these discernments can throw on important psychic operations.
Hopefully what I have written illustrates how useful and fascinating I find dreams as therapeutic and research tools. They provide an extremely interesting, powerful path to understanding unconscious processes. There are other routes, such as parapraxes, humor, transference, countertransference, enactments, symptoms, and projective instruments like the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test. Dreams do, however, have one advantage: they are familiar and fascinating to most people. For many analysts, these nocturnal hallucinations are the regal route; others might vote for different paths.
I tend to concur with those who regard The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) as the most important book ever penned in psychology. It is not the last word on this subject, but it launched a multitude of marvelous projects pertaining not only to nocturnal mentation but also to so much more (e.g., understanding symptoms, psychosis, perversion, character formation, creativity, and thought itself). It introduced us to a royal road that has enabled us to visit, comprehend, and explore many fascinating domains that have been crucial in the evolution of human thought. Freud's profound insights that he shared in his classic text continue to assist us mightily in these necessary investigations.
From ancient Greek roots, we derived the word diagnosis, meaning to know through dividing and distinguishing. Approaching Professor Perdu's dream from multiple perspectives permitted us to divine different facets of its nature. We came to know not only his dream but also his condition and its challenges more fully. Looking at this clinical specimen
as a dream-within-a-dream leads one in certain directions as one accommodates to and challenges existing theory. Regarding it more in terms of partial awakenings takes one to different possibilities. Our diagnoses, that is, our differentiated understanding of dreams and dreamers, are enriched by these multiple approaches that can challenge, complement, and enrich each other in our quest for ever better comprehension.