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The purpose of this communication is to focus attention not on the form and content of the dream, but on dreaming as a process. Since we make use of the same apparatus whether we are awake or asleep, the dream process in sleep and the thought process when awake must be understood together, if we hope to understand the relationship between the two. It is my thesis that both awake and asleep, there is a constant asymbolic (imageless) preconscious stream of central activity and that this preconscious stream is sampled by means of conscious symbolic representatives, by a process which in turn is vulnerable to distortion under the influence of unconscious conflicts. In essence this is what Freud called the 'topological' aspects of mentation, and therefore of dreaming.
I will make no further use of this metaphor, however, nor of certain other metaphors which appear currently in psychoanalytic writings, and which are regularly miscalled 'hypotheses'. Nor will I debate them in this brief paper. I will only mention the fact that the term 'topological' has never seemed to me a happy one because of its static connotations. Webster defines topology as 'the description of a particular place; the history of a region as indicated by its topography; the configuration of a surface'.
For the sake of clarity I must register one other dissent. I believe that analysts of all schools are in agreement that the dynamic interplay among the systems Cs, Pcs, and Ucs implements all human psychological processes; that they have biogenetic