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The Chairman, Brian Robertson, introduced the panel by noting that dreams are complex constructs of memories, perceptions and emotions. He suggested that an examination of the interface of material and psychic reality in the remembered dream might offer us a unique vantage-point from which to study psychic reality.
In a presentation entitled ‘Dreams and reality’, Cesio began by carefully elucidating the various levels of psychic and material reality that are woven into the construct of the dream. Cesio noted that in so far as dreams are composed of hallucinatory images and derived from unconscious desires that the dreamer wishes to fulfil, they are imaginary and hence partake of psychic reality. But in so far as dreams either have a basis in an actual historical event that took place in the objective reality of the dreamer's childhood or are tied to somatic events occurring to the dreamer during sleep, they partake of material reality.
In the clinical situation, the stimulus for a dream may be a fantasy or wish involving the analyst—psychic reality—that gives rise to real affect, such as castration anxiety—material reality. In this sense, Cesio suggested that the structure of the dream was comparable to that of the word, which simultaneously possesses an imaginary element—psychic reality, in its symbolic and connotative-evocative aspects and a denotative aspect that is rooted in the actuality—material reality—of what that word refers to. In the brief examples given, Cesio emphasised his view that the somatic level of material reality that is part of the dreamer's experience of the dream has a concrete, material basis in ‘cellulo-humoural-neurovegetative’ events—(e.g. the actual physiological events that accompany and produce anxiety in the nightmare)—which are associated with the somatic changes that take place in the dreamer's body at the moment of the dream.
Lane's presentation, ‘Personal myth and personal metaphor: a second look at secondary revision’, continued the