Using Shari Appollon’s article in this issue as a point of departure, I reflect on the phenomenon of shared reverie between analyst and patient, noting its quasi-fantastical dimension, something that feels simultaneously rooted in and transcendent of uncanny presence and absence. I go on to discuss post-Greenian approaches to psychic aliveness in the wake of relational deadening and dissociation, before exploring my own use of an eerie transitional object – a long-buried novel by the exiled Haitian writer Marie Vieux Chauvet – in a mind-altering process of post-traumatic self-resuscitation.