A significant "dream within a dream"

This brief clinical note is an attempt to clarify Freud's remarks regarding the significance of real occurrences of the "dream within a dream". There is affirmation of the reality of an actual event in the manifest dream (the "tickling" in adolescence). Certain representations regarding real events are alluded to in the manifest dream and are confirmed by the latent dream thoughts (the underlying homosexual theme involving the patient's mother and herself). Within the ongoing transference neurosis, a new understanding led this patient to experience intense sexual affects which were recalled for the first time during the course of an analytic session. The analyst's attention to this "dream within a dream" led to a facilitating active interpretation of the repressed sexual feelings. At the same time it was possible to observe a developmental arrest which had interfered with the consolidation of the patient's adolescent maturation begin to be undone by interpretation. The process of disengaging the patient from her unconscious bond with her mother (the undoing of the negative oedipal involvement) had been set in motion. The "dream within a dream" seems to represent a special defensive effort of the dream work to encapsulate the memory of one or more related actual events and the intense affects associated with them--affects whose pressure for discharge threaten to arouse the sleeper. The form the dream assumes is related to its hidden sexual origins and engages the active participation of both patient and analyst.     

A poem and a dream

Recently, a journalist in analysis had a dream that stimulated the writing of a poem, the two psychic products occurring no more than a few hours apart. Since the analysand had copious free associations to both products, believing both to be culled from the same unconscious raw material, an interesting study of an act of aesthetic creation almost in statu nascendi became possible. A concept called poem work is entertained in this paper and is compared and contrasted with the classical psychoanalytic concept of dream work, allowing some unanswerable questions to be posed and discussed in regard to the formal constitutive elements of poetry.     

不再是梦

皿..8 d﹁。山三曾经有个夜晚我梦见自己孤单一人心比沙土沉苦比石头重生活的无奈和凄楚像大锤击碎了我的心重拾那些心的碎片组合成两个字绝望忽然有一天一个柔和的声音春风一样舒心百合一样美丽清泉一样甜润是夜行人的光是孤儿的母亲是绝望者的救星是孤苦人的知音啊,那是天上     

Draw me a dream

Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy -     

The manifest dream in psychoanalysis: a clarification

Controversies about the value of the manifest dream in psychoanalysis are usually a matter of semantics. The author concludes that two clinically meaningful questions about the manifest dream can be asked: Is the patient's report of a dream useful in formulating an interpretation if no formal associations to the dream elements are given? Inasmuch as such reports always include some kind of associations, and the analyst always possesses considerable knowledge about the patient, the answer to this question would seem to be "Yes, at least at times." In what ways can the manifest dream contribute to our understanding of the dream and the dreamer? Both the literature and clinical experience indicate that there are many ways; these are summarized in an appendix. One approach, the direct decoding of manifest dream elements, is discussed in some detail. Several examples of the undisguised appearance of memories of childhood traumatic experiences in the manifest dream are presented.