The dream-like event

Abstract

Sometimes real-life events seem unreal, due to their highly symbolic nature and relevance to the person’s inner life. In this paper, I propose that although these events are actual, lived occurrences, they can be treated like dreams, with significant clinical effect. These “dream-like” events (DLEs) – distinguished from Jung’s synchronicity events – seem to be universal, even though some people are more perceptive of them than others. DLEs are usually reported in therapy in a casual way, as something that happened recently, or as a recollection or association. The resemblance or connection to the patient’s inner life is hidden from the patient, because of the unconscious element involved. Clinical examples of DLEs are presented, as well as ways of interpreting them. An attempt is made to put these unique, sometimes uncanny occurrences into the context of Bion’s psychoanalytic ontology and into relation to his central concept, “O.”

Key words:

• dreams
• dream-like events
• Bion's O
• dream interpretation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Hallucinosis’ is a term coined by Bion (1965) to denote the mental state of the psychotic part of the personality – a result of the infant’s emotional contents failing to find a container. In hallucinosis, according to O’Shaughnessy (2005), “there is a failure of realistic projective identification; instead there is an explosive projection in an unrestricted mental space … where words and images float without limits … Such beta-elements and bizarre objects indicate a place where the object should be, but, as the container is destroyed, is not. This place feels very threatening” (pp. 722–723).

2 The analytic understanding of “reality testing” – unlike the philosophic concept of the nature of reality –puts the emphasis “upon the differentiation between representations of what is external – of the object world – from representations of what is internal – of the self or of mental life” (Arlow, 2018, p. 127).

3 Freud (1901) wrote that there are three classes of dream, according to their attitude to wish-fulfilment: “The first class consists of those which represent an unrepressed wish undisguisedly … Secondly there are the dreams which express a repressed wish disguisedly; these no doubt form the overwhelming majority of all our dreams, and require analysis before they can be understood. In the third place there are the dreams which represent a repressed wish, but do so with insufficient or no disguise” (p. 674).

4 Every 35 days, to be precise, according to Littlewood’s calculations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gideon Lev

Gideon Lev is a clinical psychologist and author of the books llove (Matar, 2015), Truth Love Faith: A psychoanalytic and historic look at the meaning of life (Carmel, 2018) and Spiritually sensitive psychoanalysis, a short introduction (Routledge, 2023). He teaches on the International Program in Liberal Arts and at the School of Psychotherapy at Tel Aviv University, Israel.