Savant syndrome and dreams

Dear Sirs,

Many thanks to Ogden (2003) for having creatively brought together Bion's theory, Borges's story ‘Funes the Memorius’ and a vignette from his clinical practice. I see the material somewhat differently from Ogden. In his conjunction of observations, there is the possibility of discovering an ‘endoneuropsychic perception’, an unusual mental phenomenon that may shed light on the structure of the mind and brain (Blechner, 2001).

In my reading, ‘Funes the Memorius’ describes a man with ‘savant syndrome’. He has an extraordinary memory for detail, but an inability to abstract from detail. From Borges's text, I am not certain that Funes is unable to dream; it remains an open question. Funes has trouble eliminating the vivid details from his mind in order to fall asleep; as a strategy, he envisions unknown houses, which he imagines to be black. But, once asleep, he may or may not dream like most people.

Funes is quite similar to the case of ‘S’ the mnemonist described in Luria (1987). S could not entertain the concept of ‘nothing’. For him, the word ‘nothing’ conjured up visual stimuli, and, like Funes, he had to turn his attention to ‘something’ with little content in order to imagine ‘nothing’.

A prominent feature of S's mental life is that he turned all abstract information into visual images. This, as we know, is a common feature of mental processing as people experience hypnagogic imagery while falling asleep. It is an important question how savants experience falling asleep, what their dreams are like if they can dream at all and how they remember them. Such data would also allow us to assess, in Bion's terms, the savant's alpha function.

I have been unable so far to find any literature on this question. A personal communication from Treffert, an expert on savant syndrome (see Treffert and Wallace, 2002), conveyed no knowledge about the dreams of savants, although Treffert would be interested in such data. Luria's book also does not mention nocturnal dreams, alt