A Crossword in a Dream

A fifty-two-year-old man, a novelist by trade, who had entered analysis with writer’s block three years earlier, dreamt a dream that illustrated the main conflicts of the analysis with such an economy of means that he vowed to use the compressed imagery of the dream in the new novel he was working on. The writer’s block had pretty much disappeared and the analysand was beginning to contemplate termination. Here is the dream:

An old friend greeted him by touching him cheek to cheek. They were both carrying suitcases, so a cheek-to-cheek greeting was the sole avenue of contact available to them. The old friend was called Manuel Wald in the dream. He knew the friend in question (even if his name had been reconfigured by the dreamwork) and was happy that after a long period of estrangement that the friend had reentered his life as if there had been no estrangement at all, other than an imagined one. The dreamer notices a covered booth and enters as if it was the establishment of a palmist or fortuneteller. It turns out to be a crossword puzzle boutique in which each entrant was given a clue and asked to supply the right answer. The clue that was assigned to the dreamer was for six down, which was about a king who drowned in the crown. The dreamer knows the answer almost

Eugene J. Mahon is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research and a member of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, Princeton, New Jersey. He was awarded The Alexander Beller Award of Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute and The George Daniels award . He has been on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is currently on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

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immediately and says “Richard II” but then quickly corrects himself saying “no, I mean Clarence as in Richard III.”

The analysand (let’s call him Saul) was quick to associate: six do