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“… healthy mental growth seems to depend on truth as the living organism depends on food. If it is lacking or deficient, the personality deteriorates.”
Dreams are, perhaps, the most truthful way we talk to ourselves. Daily, we face disturbing events that contradict what we believe to be true. Through their emotional impact, these experiences continue as thoughts and dreams during sleep and in waking unconscious dreaming (Bion, 1962). In this review, I consider the use of film as a way of dreaming the truth.
For Bion (1962, 1992), dreaming must involve unconscious psychological work by which we process elements of experience. We do not evaluate dreams as communications to ourselves or others based on the plausibility of their manifest content or rational logic. We rely, instead, on one of Freud's criteria for dream interpretation— representability—which is the effectiveness of the dream images to convey emotional experience. Dreams do not need to represent in terms of accuracy, but, rather, they need the power to represent images that are true to unconscious life (not necessarily true to everyday life).
The film Heaven brings together the dream world and the world of film. Written by Kryzysztof Kieslowski and directed by Tom Tykwer, “Heaven” begins by dropping us, the viewers, into an eerie, unsettling world of images and sounds. The experience is one of being untethered and ungrounded, floating above a terrain that seems neither real nor completely imaginary. We struggle in the opening scene to make sense of what is happening, and yet the colors, shapes, and sounds somehow stand on their own beyond an organizing narrative. We see a green film screen akimbo to the terrain below. We hear background noises—a continuous and monotonous whirring sound with