On not being able to dream

In this paper, the author explores the phenomenon of not being able to dream (as opposed to not being able to remember one's dreams) from three different vantage points. First, from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory, he discusses Bion's idea that the work of dreaming creates the conscious and unconscious mind (and not the other way around). A person who cannot dream is unable to generate differentiable conscious and unconscious experience and, consequently, lives in a psychic state in which he is unable to differentiate waking from sleeping, dreaming from perceiving. The author then approaches the problem of the inability to dream from the perspective achieved by a literary work. He discusses a Borges fiction that creates, in a singularly artful way, the experience of not being able to dream. Finally, the author utilises the vantage point of a detailed account of a clinical experience to explore what it means not to be able to dream. He describes an initial state characterised by the patient's proliferation of unutilisable ‘psychic noise’ which, over a period of years, led to the analyst's experiencing ‘reverie-deprivation’ and brief periods of counter-transfererce psychosis. Two analytic sessions are presented and discussed in which psycho logical work was done that contributed to an enhanced capacity on the part of both patient and analyst for genuine dreaming—both in sleep and in analytic reverie states.