‘Dreams that turn over a page …’

Dear Sir,

I was delighted to read Jean-Michel Quinodoz's paper on ‘dreams that turn over a page’, as well as the lively internet discussion so well summarised by Paul Williams. However, I do not agree with the statement that ‘Study of the literature yields no description that matches the type of dream Quinodoz discusses’ (p. 847). On the contrary, there have been several reports of dreams in which psychotic material is incorporated into patients’ dreams as they progress in psychoanalytic treatment.

The first that I know of is from Silvano Arieti (1963), who reported on a patient who had delusions that the Russians were invading New York and had interpreted the red sunset over the Hudson River as a divine warning that the whole world would become red. Arieti traced this to a letter from her parents announcing that they would come for a visit to New York.

The patient had left her Southern, conservative family, to live in Greenwich Village in a wild way that her parents, and she (to some degree) would disapprove of. As the patient's state improved, she dreamt that she was being chased by her parents all over New York City: She saw in this dream scenes similar to those she saw in her acute delusional state, including the scene around the Hudson River. She was afraid and kept hiding. Finally, however, she felt she did not care whether the parents caught her or not. They would not hurt her. She decided she had nothing to hide and went towards the parents to meet them.

I have reported on similar phenomena (1983, 1995), as has Eric Marcus (1992).

Yours sincerely