A Waking Screen Analogous to the Dream Screen

The concept of a dream screen has been introduced by Lewin (4). The following quotations from his paper delineate this concept. 'The dream screen, as I define it, is the surface on to which a dream appears to be projected. It is the blank background, present in the dream though not necessarily seen, and the visually perceived action in ordinary manifest dream contents takes place on it or before it… The dream screen appears to represent the breast during sleep, but it is ordinarily obscured by the various derivatives of the preconscious and unconscious that locate themselves before it or upon it. These derivatives, according to Freud, are the intruders in sleep… The dream screen is the representative of the wish to sleep. The visual contents represent its opponents, the wakers.'

I wish to report a phenomenon of waking life related to the dream screen. A young man in a lengthy analysis, whose symptoms included a disturbance of potency and marked inhibition of social and aggressive activities, had several times stated in the course of therapy that objects did not appear vivid and clear to him. He recognized this because it contrasted with the clarity and vividness with which, on rare occasions, objects did appear to him. He often remarked that he did not see reality clearly. Quite regularly when he became angry with me he would state that I appeared very much blurred to him. His basic problem with his mother was a fear of not being fed (loved) if he expressed any of his independent and aggressive impulses. His actual early oral relationship to his mother was traumatic. His mother breast-fed him until he was three or