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During the eight months she has been in analysis with me, my patient has often dreamt about our work. We go on journeys together, we build new houses or renovate old ones, we make nice meals for a child—herself. In these dreams, she usually appears both as she is now, a widow in her forties, childless, an architect, and as a child whose age often points us to the developmental meaning of the dream. The dreams both recreate her past and recreate how our work has brought her past newly into her present experience. Several times she has remarked that she doesn't really understand, or really feel, something we have said about her childhood in a session until she dreams about it afterward. The interpretation of dreams is a new discovery for her, a new way of being and being intimate, talking more freely than she can otherwise. “Real life makes me choke up, it's too confusing.”
On September 11th, the real life “Attack on America” was confusing beyond anyone's dreams. But three months later this patient and I reached some clarity about our experiences of it—some clarity that needed interpreting a dream together to emerge. This story, a story of and about psychoanalysis and September 11th, began on a clear, bright January day, when my patient came in saying “The night after our last session, I had another of those dreams of the therapy process.” Then she settled onto the couch and rushed into it, excited by the thinking she had already done about it, and interpreting it further as she went.
The first part featured us on a journey in the countryside, where she and her husband had renovated the weekend house that she had sold soon after his death six years ago because going there alone was too painful. In the dream, she was surprised that she had joined me so quickly, traveling by train, “right up the Croton-Hudson line, zip.” She was impressed that I knew so much about the place where we would be traveling and could answer all her questions. Pausing to interpret this amazement