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In an engrossing poem titled “I Am Not Even Dust,” Jorges Luis Borges ends with these thoughts:
That I might be allowed to dream the otherWhose fertile memory will be a partof all the days of man, I humbly pray:My god, my dreamer, keep on dreaming me.(Borges, 1999, pp. 399-401)
Most North American analysts would dismiss the last line, in particular, as religious mysticism, a leftover from a predifferentiated developmental stage, something to be resolved and not celebrated. John Gedo (1999), in his The Evolution of Psychoanalysis, goes so far as to state that recent neurological findings suggest that dreams have no meaning at all, implying that to attribute meaning to them is a mentalist presupposition unworthy of a scientific, biologically grounded, psychoanalysis (p. 204). While making a didactically clear and at times persuasive argument, Gedo's position, as I read him, ignores our metaphorical modes of thinking as well as our culturally dependent awareness of a beyond in our midst, a beyond that has been articulated in terms of transcendence: either the absolute transcendence, which Western religious traditions have highlighted, or the relative everyday experience of transcendence, which Grotstein studies in his attempt to locate the dreamer who dreams the dream.
In a tour de force entailing a reading of Freud, Jung, Lacan, M. Klein, Winnicott, Heidegger, Matte-Blanco, and Bion, among others, Grotstein posits the basic function of the dream as a communication between what he categorized as “the ineffable subject of the unconscious”