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

Sometimes things happen in real life that seem unreal, dream-like, due to their highly symbolic nature and relevance to the person’s inner, often unconscious life. This is an intriguing phenomenon that has escaped analytic attention. In this paper, I propose that although these “dream-like” events (DLEs) are real, lived occurrences, they can be treated like actual dreams, with significant clinical effect.

The central, definin­g element of the DLE is its symbolism: an external occurrence, brought up in therapy as an association or recollection of an event that happened to the patient outside the treatment room, symbolizes a vital, often unconscious piece of mental reality. Symbolism is, as Freud stressed in “The interpretation of dreams” (1900), one the central tools used by “regular” dreaming “for the disguised representation of their latent thoughts” (p. 352). As I will show, the DLE relies heavily also on displacement (Verschiebung) and condensation (Verdichtung), “the two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams” (Freud, 1900, p. 309). Lastly, DLEs often involve plays on words and puns, which characterize many of Freud’s own dreams (1900, p. 298).

Being “dream-like,” the events in question may have a surreal, fantastical, or even uncanny quality, yet the way they are reported does not suggest they are the outcome of patients’ projection of their inner life. In addition, even though their symbolism may seem exaggerated, almost fabricated, these reported events do not raise a question of “pseudologia fantastica” (pathological lying), or hallucinosis,¹ or questions regarding the patient’s reality testing.² They also cannot be considered the outcome of daydreaming, as daydreams denote “conscious fantasies that reflect frequently current or sometimes continuing wishes from earlier days” (Singer, 1998, p. 141), whereas DLEs are not fantasies but events in real life.

These occurrences seem to be universal, even though some people are more perceptive of them than others. With certain patients, an entire analysis can take place with few DLEs coming up, or none at all, while with other patients they appear in almost every session, sometimes more than once in a session. The analyst’s receptivity is also crucial: if a patient reports DLEs and fails to evoke a substantial response, they may cease doing so.

The DLE is distinguished from synchronicity events, described by Jung (1952). Jung’s term refers to unique occurrences in which two or more coinciding events are connected meaningfully but not causally. A famous example given by Jung (1952) is the appearance of a rare beetle in the consulting room just as his patient recalled a dream involving that beetle. The two events – the flight of the beetle into the clinic and the recollection of the dream – are meaningfully connected (a connection that had a profound effect on the patient), but are not connected causally: the one did not make the second happen, and vice versa. The DLE, on the other hand, is a single event easily explained casually, which stands out because while it actually takes place in outer reality, it sheds light on the inner one, or resembles it.

The DLE also differs from transpersonal events, described by Tennes (2007a, 2007b). Tennes (2007b) defines transpersonal events as encounters that involve “a complex, multidimensional, and mysterious intersection of the analyst’s and patient’s lives expressed through moments of uncanny circumstance … profound awareness of startling interconnectedness” (Tennes, 2007b, p. 552). The transpersonal event is thus an unexplained occurrence of connection between analyst and patient. An example Tennes (2007a) gave was of a patient taking the same office the analyst had longed to rent (thus reconstructing important elements of the patient’s relationship with her mother). While symbolism of DLEs can also refer to the connection with the therapist, these occurrences are private and experienced by the patient alone, not in some interconnecting “field” as is the case with transpersonal events.

The DLE is to be distinguished also from the concept of “waking dreams” (Hunyady & Quinones, 2021). In Bion’s (1962) theory, our mind is thought to process raw stimuli by associating the sensory impressions (beta-elements) with mental images, thereby creating so-called alpha-elements. According to the neo-Bionian concept of waking dreams, “the images then form an ongoing dream-flow outside of awareness, continually producing a personal, preconscious understanding of what is taking place in and around us” (Hunyady & Quinones, 2021, p. 508, emphasis added). The DLE, on the other hand, while also containing powerful images and a dream-flow, is experienced within the conscious, aware mind, and takes place outside the mental realm of the individual’s subjectivity.

Perhaps closest to the idea of the DLE is post-Bionian author Antonino Ferro’s (2009) idea of considering the entire analytic session as a dream. Ferro suggests that the analyst’s most important activity is facilitating a process of transformation in dreaming. This transformation operates by the analyst referring to each of the patient’s communications as if it was the report of a dream. When each of the analysand’s communications is preceded in the analyst’s mind with the words “I had a dream … ,” a “narrative deconstruction” is created that enables the activation of transformational processes, as it “immediately opens the way to much wider and sometimes even unforeseeable possibilities of understanding and managing the communication itself” (Ferro, 2009, p. 215). Ferro emphasized that this approach, which lays stress on the oneiric quality of analytic sessions, “relates exclusively to analytic work” (p. 211, original emphasis). In contrast, in the current presentation of DLEs, some actual life events are seen as having an oneiric quality by themselves, and not only because they were reported in analysis.

The DLE is thus a unique kind of occurrence, in some ways resembling synchronistic events, transpersonal events, waking dreams, and “regular” night-time dreams, yet is different from them. DLEs also do not seem like the outcome of unconscious choices that impact the person’s surroundings to more closely resemble their inner world, or simply the result of unconscious choices that determine what occurrences the patient brings up in analysis. While the patients’ unconscious often affects what patients remember, and certainly what stands out to them and thus finds its way to analysis, this does not seem enough to explain the uniqueness of DLEs. These occurrences, as I will show, go beyond the possible impact of the person and do not seem to be shaped by the them, even if unconsciously.

The patient usually reports the DLE 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 usually hidden from the patient, because of the unconscious element involved. However, after many such instances are recognized in the therapeutic discourse, some patients can, by themselves, make the connection between these events and their psychic reality.

The concept probably sounds strange, perhaps even incomprehensible. To illustrate the character of these events, below I present a few examples of DLEs taken from my clinical work, trusting they will best display the character of these events. After presenting the clinical examples, I will proceed to discuss ways of interpreting DLEs. Then, in the last section of the paper, before concluding, I will attempt to put these unique, sometimes uncanny occurrences in the context of Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytic ontology.

Clinical examples of dream-like events

From a naive point of view, dreams seem to be very different from daytime experience. But as Eigen (2007) observed, “The contrast between dream and waking life is porous” (p. 19). According to him, “Dreaming is a kind of waking life that goes on while sleeping and something akin to dreaming goes on while we are awake” (p. 19).

In this section I will portray a few such awake-occurrences, “akin to dreaming,” which were reported and analysed in therapy.

The baby behind the wall

F. entered the clinic and, as would often happen, fell into a long, burdensome silence. She could not say anything and obviously suffered for it. At some point she uttered, “Well, again!” After some minutes, she begged, “Help me, Gideon, please!” That meeting took place on the eve of New Year. I thought to myself that F. could comment about that, and break the silence that she found so burdensome. But she did not. Then, suddenly, she said:

My flat is divided into two – a big part, of four rooms, where I live, and a small part, consisting of one room. That one-room flat had been occupied by two foreign women who came to Israel to work. After they left, a family arrived, with a baby. They also came from abroad to work. The landlord seems to me to be a “mafioso,” he keeps bringing foreigners. The baby was crying and I thought – something should be done, why don’t they do anything? He doesn’t cry much, but at that moment, he cried.”

When I questioned her, F. replied that she never actually saw the baby: she shared a wall with the family, but had never met them.

This minor incident reflected F.’s inner world and the work she was doing in therapy. In a marvelous display of condensation, the baby could be seen to represent both F. herself, who had experienced a terrible tragedy, who cries for help, needs me, cannot soothe herself alone; it also represents a part of herself that she cannot reach, as it is blocked behind a wall, a part of her that cannot find its voice, hence it “does not cry much”; in addition, the baby represents her own baby son, who died in an act of violence at a very young age, the baby F. cannot reach and help as she is blocked by the wall that separates the living from the dead.

The physical wall itself can also be seen to symbolize the metaphoric wall that separates F., who is locked in the small cell of her grief, from the world outside. Since the tragedy, four years ago, F. (herself an immigrant who moved to Israel a few years before her baby was born) disconnected herself from society – she quit work, now hardly leaves the house, and broke off her relationships with friends.

As we talk, F. has an association: when her baby was alive, F., her husband, and their son lived in a small flat, “exactly like the one where the crying baby lives, precisely the same number of square meters.” I say: “You stayed in that room, froze everything in your life.” F.’s following association was that the landlord suggested that she move to the smaller flat, but she refused: “There wasn’t a big difference in the rent.” I took this association to reveal, unconsciously, that F. is beginning to be ready to leave the small cell of grief.

In the next session, F. started talking the moment she sat down. She said she had met the neighbors and the baby: “He is now a friend of mine.” F. held him in her arms, the first time she had touched a baby since her son died.

One phase

T. and his wife broke up five years ago. They had a loving but highly tumultuous relationship. Since then he has had affairs with women, she with men. But deep inside, without acknowledging it, T. never gave up on reuniting the family. They continue to have joint dinners with their children every now and then, and on these occasions he tries to seduce her back. These attempts, he says, make her irritated and withdrawn, and he gets deeply hurt and sinks into depression. Eventually, they decided to have a sincere conversation about what was going on between them. In that conversation T.’s ex-wife made it very clear they would never get back together. When the two of them were together, she reminded him, they both suffered.

The day after their conversation, a very cold winter day, the fuel for heating ran out in T.’s house. He and his son there nearly froze. That same day, the toilet overflowed. And that night, their power blacked out. All the buildings in the street had power, he told me: theirs was the only one to be dark. “Our neighbors all have a three-phase electric power system, and our house is the only one with single-phase system,” he explained. Next morning, he wanted to leave the house and take his son to school – and found the doorknob was stuck. He called for a locksmith to change the entire mechanism. While waiting for the locksmith to arrive, his son, who did not want to miss class, jumped through the window to get out; although they live on the ground floor, this was quite dangerous. This flat is where T. and his ex-wife last lived as a family, a rented place he insisted on retaining even though he had bought a beautiful flat nearby after the break-up.

After our discussion of these happenings, T. became deeply saddened. The reality he had been ignoring for years was mirrored in the surreal chain of events: that he is locked in, stuck, in a cold, dark, emotionally flooding existence: he is still sticking to the same “phase,” unable to expand it, to add new phases to his life, to accommodate reality.

The radiant heater

A., a four-times-a-week patient, had a severe breakdown two years into therapy, quite similar to a breakdown her mother had had when A. was a little girl, and her mom was about A.’s current age. The mother never recovered and remained cold and distant from her daughter, who kept yearning for a closer connection. In one of our sessions, A. cried desperately: “What help is it to talk about my mom?” She then fell silent, looking at her feet, defeated.

After a few minutes, A.’s gaze rose to the radiant heater in the clinic. She said, “In the house where I grew up, we had such a heater. One day, when it was switched off, I wanted to feel the coil, so I touched it through the protection grille. It gave me an electric shock.” I said that I understand her childhood home lacked warmth, but she wanted to feel something, not be left “cold,” with nothing. And so she penetrated the barrier separating her from the source of heat, and touched the cold coil, sensing that the potential pain would be better than nothing (I was thinking of Harlow’s monkeys). Now things are different, I continued: we are talking about Mom, with the heater near us producing warmth.

When I’m 94

Throughout her adult life C. kept falling in love with impossible men, while driving away possible ones who fell in love with her. She came to therapy when she was in her early forties, still single, completely infatuated with a married colleague whom she had fallen in love with, one-sidedly, three years before. During our meetings, I said a few times, trying to benignly create a perspective on her choices, that I do not want her to reach 94 and regret her lifelong choices. At the beginning of a session, few months into therapy, C. said:

I had a strange coincidence yesterday. I went to the usual café [where she used to have business meetings with the man she loved] and all the tables were taken. I went out for a walk and came back, and still couldn’t spot a free table. Someone who sat alone by a table signaled that I could join her, and promised she wouldn’t bother me. Eventually we talked for hours. She is 94. That made me laugh. Even at 94, what do you think she talked about? Sex!

I commented that it was as if she had met her older self, and C. replied that at one point in their meeting that the elderly lady had asked C. her name. To C.’s reply the lady said that, strangely, at self-service cafés, like the one where they sat, when asked for her name, she changes it from Ella (which means “goddess” in Hebrew) to her granddaughter’s name, which is similar to C.’s.

That same session, C. said she decided to tell me about her history, something she had adamantly refused to do until that point in therapy. She said the first thing she wanted to tell me about was her two grandmothers: “This is where I thought to start my story.” They both loved her more than all their other grandchildren, but demanded she keep this preference and the privileges coming with it secret.

The “dreamed-up” real meeting with “the grandmother of her-self,” which incorporated an element from therapy (my use of the imaginary point of view of being 94) opened up something in C., and allowed her to associate more freely. The mixture she mentioned, of love and concealment, turned out to be central to the dynamic of many of her relationships.

Up and down

As N. entered the clinic, I immediately noticed a bruise on his arm. He said that the previous weekend he had gone hiking with friends: they ascended by cable car to the highest mountain peak in the country, and then walked down. It was a hard, steep descent, with big boulders obstructing the way. N. walked with a son of good friends, who bears the same name as his. The young boy was “very brave,” N. said, but at some point nearly fell over, and decided it was too much for him. N. tried to break him a walking stick from a piece of wood but injured himself in the process. In passing, N. mentioned two other members of the group – someone who had broken a leg on a previous hike, and a man suffering from gout.

A central issue in our sessions were N.’s oscillations between highs and lows. He ascends quickly and gets “very high” on his manic episodes, then collapses into long, difficult periods of “downs,” as he calls them. The DLE digested these elements: it revolved around a journey that reached – very quickly, with a cable car – the highest of places; then turned into a descent, which had its array of difficulties – boulders, broken leg, disease. The little boy, representing the patient’s recovering self, the part of him that seeks therapy and growth, is very brave, but loses courage at some point. The attempt to help him causes injury, representing periods of regression and despair in our work together. The slower descent, by foot, represented what we tried to do in therapy – to balance and moderate the oscillations, to observe the hard places without collapsing into them. Eventually, N. managed to pull through, and all the members (or aspects) of the journey – the young, the sick, the broken – reached the end of the hike.

Small trees

Many DLEs, as do many dreams, refer to the therapeutic work itself, as is shown in the following examples.

M., an avid gardener, says:

There is this big tree in my garden. In the springtime lots of little trees, a whole forest, grow underneath it. I have to work a whole hour every day just to pull them out one by one. I also planted calla lilies, but they don’t grow so well. It is a very beautiful plant.

The multitude of trees that have to be plucked, one by one, I took to symbolize the many painful memories that kept coming from the root, that is – from the unconscious. “Calla” is a lovely pun – meaning “simple” or “easy” in Hebrew. This daily analytic work isn’t simple or easy, M. says, but the result can be “very beautiful.”

The water lily

In another session, M. talked about a water lily in her garden and mentioned that for many years she had not been able to understand how the plant reproduces (in Hebrew, the water lily is referred to in the feminine). Recently, M. told me with a beaming smile, she realized how the process works: “out of the flower comes another flower, slowly, slowly it grows and eventually it separates and become independent.”

The air-conditioning system

S. is a rigid, rational, construction engineer in his forties. It took us many months and struggles with strong resistance until a stable working alliance was formed. At one of our sessions during this period in therapy, S. told of an incident at work. In a building his company manages, the air-conditioning system was strangely placed, and the filter could not be reached for two years. Eventually, “the system started to draw air from the sewage.” With considerable effort, “the workers managed to get to the machine, opened it up, and found the filter to be like a wall, completely blocked.” In a reflective moment, S. added: “It is the same as with my emotions. And when you clean up – dirt flies around, sullying me and whoever’s near me.”

Birds of love

In a session with K., I referred to the therapeutic relationship. She dismissed my interpretation, and I said that in some way, what she talks about, although seemingly disconnected, often has to do with what happens in the clinic between the two of us. K. interrupted me before I finished the sentence:

I don’t know why I am telling this, but yesterday I was at the central bus station – I don’t like it, it’s filthy, physically as well as spiritually – and all of a sudden I heard birds. I looked around and saw two uniquely colored parrots, lovebirds, personatas [this is the common name in Hebrew for the yellow-collared lovebird species, following the scientific name, Agapornis personatus]. The seller had them locked up in their cage. I asked him why, and he explained that he does this not as a protection against thieves, but because what these birds do is that one opens the cage and the other escapes. I don’t know why I told you this.

I offered an interpretation: her association came after I had talked about the relationship between her and me. It is indeed a beautiful symbol for therapy: two unique birds, personatas-personas, who meet in unpleasant circumstances (as patients almost always come to therapy when things get “filthy”, literally and spiritually). One bird (the therapist) opens the cage for the other. K. was very moved, and so was I.

Two cellars

After about a year into therapy, Y. seemed stuck. He said so himself, that nothing in his life was moving. I encouraged him, as I do often, to give an association, something he had never done so far, fearful of what might come up if he even slightly lowered his defenses. But he yielded, for the first time.

A childhood memory rose to the surface, then another one: He comes back home from the playground with a rip in his new pants, and his enraged dad breaks his favorite toy; he is out of the family house and cannot enter, being punished. He then tells of a memory of a flat belonging to an uncle where his nuclear family stayed for a few short periods during his childhood, when they were moving from one rental flat to another. The flat was not connected to the electric grid, and was very small. Y. remembers it had a cellar in the back yard. Once he went down there. It was cold and dark, and he turned on a light. On the shelves were many jars of pickles, “tasty things.” He recalls the neighbor also had a cellar, but his was not in the yard, it was underneath the building. He was very curious to know what was in there, and one day he went down with the neighbor. The descent was hard: “the stairs were all broken.” In the cellar he saw “many photos of frightening people.”

I was moved to hear his stories. The first time he let himself go down, with associations, to the unconscious floor of his mind, two cellar-memories were evoked. In one cellar were things that were inedible, but turned “tasty” by a long, patient process of maturation. This cellar was dark, but a light could be turned on. The second cellar was closer to home, located beneath the building and not in the yard, yet going down there was difficult and dangerous, and it was full of frightening photos. Who are these people in Y’s unconscious cellar? We could now proceed to find out.

Making sense of dream-like events

I hope these brief vignettes give some impression of the “feel” of DLEs. But what can we make of them?

The ongoing attempt to unlock the secret of night-time dreams consists mainly of the effort to understand their function. Using the knowledge gained in this fertile field of research could perhaps help us understand DLEs as well.

Contemporary approaches to dream analysis give an abundance of answers to the question “Why do we dream?” Many answers relate to cognitive goals, such as “cleaning” the mind from unwanted neural connections and contents, integrating new information acquired during the day with prior knowledge, and regulating mood (Blechner, 2013). These functions can perhaps be achieved also through the verbalization of relevant events that have actually taken place in daily life, as we can see in the DLE vignettes given above. The Air-Conditioning System DLE, for instance, could be seen as symbolizing an inner “cleansing” of the mind; The Water Lily as representing an integration of new information about relationships and inner growth; and When I’m 94 as being a depiction of an inner attempt to regulate mood and, especially, feelings of loneliness and rejection.

Psychic functions ascribed to dreams could be relevant to DLEs as well, and be fulfilled through them, just as they are achieved by regular night-time dreams. Such functions are the fulfilment of a wish, repressed or conscious (Freud, 1900, 1901),³ compensation for an excessively one-sided conscious attitude (Jung, 1948), the communication of something that could not be otherwise said (Kanzer, 1955), and the formulation of thoughts that could not be formulated in waking thinking (Blechner, 1998).

The Heater DLE could be seen to represent a wish for a warm connection with a paternal figure. The One Phase DLE compensates for the one-sided extreme attitude of the patient desiring a reunion with his ex-wife, portraying the problems posed by this yearned-for solution to his condition. The Baby Behind the Wall communicates a message to the therapist that the patient could not find another way to deliver, as it involved material too painful for her to discuss directly. Up and Down can be seen to formulate thoughts that could not be formulated in waking thinking, regarding the patient’s abrupt and uncontrolled transitions between manic and depressive states, and how to moderate them (this DLE can also be seen to fulfil the wish to gradually and moderately reach a psychic equilibrium, neither manic nor depressed).

Another theoretical approach to dreams that may prove useful to understanding DLEs is Bion’s (1962) theory regarding “alpha-function.” This mental operation transforms raw sense impressions (“beta-elements”) into elements of experience (“alpha-elements”) that can be stored as unconscious memory. While beta-elements cannot be linked with one another for the creation of meaning, “alpha-elements” are accessible for psychological work. Bion (1962) wrote:

If the patient cannot transform his emotional experience into alpha-elements, he cannot dream. Alpha-function transforms sense impressions into alpha-elements which resemble, and may in fact be identical with, the visual images with which we are familiar in dreams, namely, the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has interpreted them. … Failure of alpha-function means that the patient cannot dream. (p. 7)

Following Bion, Ogden discussed patients’ “inability to dream.” According to him:

dreaming, if it is to merit the name, must involve unconscious psychological work achieved through the linking of elements of experience (which have been stored as memory) in the creation of dream-thought. … A person unable to learn from (make use of) experience is imprisoned in the hell of an endless, unchanging world of what is. (Ogden, 2003, p. 19)

Perhaps the DLE can serve as a bridge out of this “hell.” Some patients, who seem to “not be able to dream,” still can report DLEs, perhaps as a preliminary alpha-function. The patient cannot yet create a dream-thought, but can unconsciously recognize the potential for a transformation of raw sense impressions into elements of experience in an outside occurrence – and report it in therapy for the analyst to digest for them.

One might ask how the analyst is supposed to know that an event reported can be regarded as a DLE. Should the analyst know the “reality” of what happened in the patient’s life, beyond what the patient disclosed in the session, to be able to discern that the occurrence reported does in fact reflect the patient's unconscious? I would say that the knowledge of the patient’s actual real life is not necessary for the interpretation of a DLE, just as much as knowledge of the true, full “reality,” or content, of a night-time dream reported is not necessary for the analyst to interpret the dream as it was presented in the session. In fact, we know that the presentation of night-time dreams always omits and distorts.

Some patients react immediately and strongly to DLE interpretations, as many patients react to dream interpretations. Other patients, however, perhaps having a weaker “ability to dream,” may tend to resist seeing a DLE as symbolic, responding to interpretations by saying something like “I was just telling what happened.” In such cases, I usually say:

Many things happen to you outside our sessions, but only very few of them can come up in our conversations – and these are often those happenings which cause something to reverberate in you. This reverberation is what makes you tell me these specific things, and not others, and it also gives psychic value to the attempt to understand them.

This “reverberation” I understand as patients’ subtle recognition of contents that mirror themes existing in their unconscious. Bringing these up in session then allows for their transformation into alpha-elements, using the analyst’s interpretation and metabolization (alpha-function).

Dream-like events and Bion’s “O”

The fact that events that take place in real life at times tweak something inner and personal may seem odd. How did Y. have two cellars waiting in his childhood memories to be unearthed in therapy? How did C. meet accidentally a woman exactly the age her therapist used in interpretations?

One explanation is sheer coincidence. According to Littlewood’s law (Littlewood, 1986), as each of us experience tens of thousands of events each day of our life, it is statistically probable that once in a not-very-long while⁴ we will encounter a “miracle,” defined as an event with odds of one in a million. We can assume such a “miracle” might at times take the form of an outward event reflecting powerfully and accurately inner processes.

The “just a coincidence” explanation does not diminish the therapeutic potential of using DLEs in analysis. Beyond that, their uncanny nature also alludes to a potentially more mysterious source. In the last note he wrote, appearing at the end of the last volume of The Standard Edition, Freud (1938) suggested mysticism is nothing but “the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id” (p. 300, emphasis added).

Indeed, according to the mystic tradition, the outside and the inside are not sharply differentiated, are not completely separate (Hollenback, 1996). Bion (1970) suggested a relevant psychoanalytic ontology, surrounding his central concept “O.” This concept, he wrote, “denote[s] that which is the ultimate reality represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself” (p. 26). This “ultimate reality,” Bion wrote, cannot be known, but “it is possible to be at one with it” (p. 30). This is a crucial observation, as, according to Bion, “No psycho-analytic discovery is possible without recognition of [O’s] existence, at-one-ment with it” (p. 30). Hence, he concluded, what psychoanalysis requires is not a base for its theories or technique, but “a science of at-one-ment” (p. 88).

“O” represents the complete, total truth of reality, the full expression of it. As such, it resides in all the myriad elements, events, and objects that comprise this reality (Bion, 1970, p. 87). Each of these events and objects, in turn, being part of the unitary whole, reflects something of this ultimate reality. From our sense-based perspective, all events and objects seem to be separated, but these fragments are in fact “at-one” with the Whole and with each other. The outer and inner, as well as the past and the present, only seem differentiated; in fact there is no “in” or “out,” “now” or “then,” only parts of a Oneness that is beyond time and space.

This idea has some support in modern physics, for example in the work of the renowned theoretical physicist David Bohm (1980; see Godwin 1991 for a detailed comparison between Bion’s and Bohm’s theories). Bohm suggested the possibility of an “implicate order” of “Undivided Wholeness” (1980, p. 11) underlying the “explicate order” commonly perceived by humans, of things separated in time and space. DLEs can be seen to be subtle expressions of this “Wholeness,” eradicating the distinction between outer and inner, past and present. The statuettes in the cellar, the dialogue many decades later in the clinic, the presence of the patient’s whole being in the session, as well as the analyst’s – are at-one.

Indeed, according to Tennes (2007a), “Mystery is of the essence in our [psychoanalytic] work; despite our increasingly complex and compelling theories, we inevitably encounter, in the depth and richness of the psychoanalytic hour, that which cannot be explained” (p. 505). That “mystery” is evident, for instance, in the “sometimes uncanny ways in which we arrive at a knowledge of our patients’ psyches” and even more so in the “striking moments in which external and internal worlds seem to correspond” (2007a, p. 506).

Eigen (2004) commented on Bion’s work: “It is as if [he] says over and over: look, look, we are here, experi­encing – we experience. Consciousness is dumbfounding, shocking. We are ALIVE!” (p. 42; emphasis in the original). Mere existence, mere experience, is intrinsically overwhelming. The human tendency, wrote Altman (2007), is therefore to render our experience “ordinary, not amazing, in the interest of making it manageable” (p. 532). Going too far with this tendency has a price of losing touch with the wonder of life, of existence. Observing DLEs, experiencing the outside reverberating the inside, can give back a sense of amazement, of meaning, even of awe, that has been lost in modern times.

Discussion

Dream displacement, the substitution of one element in the dream for another, is the most characteristic “fact” of dream work, and is central to it – as it allows the dream-thoughts to “escape the censorship imposed by resistance” (Freud, 1900, p. 309) and so to make their way into the dream itself. In this paper, I propose the possibility of another type of displacement – substituting inner with outer.

Symbolic events from daily life cause unconscious content to reverberate, bypassing inner censorship by being supposedly “innocent.” These outer occurrences, often somewhat bizarre and seemingly unrealistic, I call “dream-like events.” Treating DLEs as we treat night-time dreams gives us a new “royal road” to the unconscious, beyond the one famously cleared by Freud (1900, p. 608).

This new road, like its predecessor, can prove useful for gaining “knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Freud, 1900, p. 608), for example with patients who do not remember dreams. There are additional benefits to embracing it: recognizing the significance of night-time dreams often helps people acknowledge the meaningfulness of the inner psychic life, an acknowledgement which is a therapeutic goal in itself; the recognition of the significance of DLEs, on the other hand, can help people acknowledge the potential meaningfulness of outer reality.

According to the prevalent modern, materialist view, objective reality is devoid of meaning. This view places us in an indifferent, disenchanted cosmos (Lev, 2016). Seeing outer reality not just as a chaotic, random blur of events but as somehow deeply connected to the inner self is a powerful tool when dealing with one the most profound psycho-existential problems – that of meaninglessness (Yalom, 1980).

All sorts of communication in analysis take place within the therapeutic relationship. This is particularly true when discussing night-time dreams (Ermann, 1999). The same holds when discussing DLEs. Taking the transference–countertransference matrix within which the DLE is reported is important, as the following vignette shows.

A patient canceled our meeting just a few hours in advance, which was very unusual for him. In our next session, he told me that the night before, he had received two phone calls – the first notifying him of the death of his old uncle, the second of the death of a close, younger colleague, who had cancer. In the morning, he learned that the two funerals were be held at the same time, in two different cemeteries, and also coinciding with our session. He deliberated which funeral to attend, and decided to go to his uncle’s. Beyond the opportunity to explore the fundamental issue of death, as well as my patient’s relationships with the two deceased people and his feelings surrounding their demise, this occurrence also allowed us to explore issues in our therapeutic relationship.

As Blechner (1995) wrote, “[in] a process of reciprocal, interactive dream interpretation, the dream’s meaning about the transference-countertransference matrix can be clarified” (p. 1). The dream – as well as the DLE – has implications for the “here-and-now” interaction between patient and analyst. In the short vignette presented here, my patient and I could explore issues regarding the patient’s perceptions of himself as “terminally ill” mentally, and fears of me dying before I had “cured” him. Themes of a fantasized powerful connection between the two of us, beyond the age difference, and the sensation of personal danger and even fear of death that accompanied this fantasy, could be explored as well.

This vignette perhaps shows also how challenging it is to deal clinically with these peculiar events. We must learn not to treat them as purely subjective constructions and, at the same time, to refrain from ascribing them a fixed, concrete meaning. As Tennes (2007a) wrote, “We are called on to hold the paradoxical recognition that we attribute meaning to our circumstance and simultaneously discover meaning within it” (p. 522).

This paradoxical position is playful in essence. Winnicott (1971) wrote about the “area of playing” that it is not inner psychic reality, yet it also does not belong to the outer reality: “It is outside the individual, but it is not the external world” (p. 51). It is almost as if Winnicott (1971) was describing the DLE: “Into this play area the child gathers objects or phenomena from external reality and uses these in the service of some sample derived from inner or personal reality” (p. 51). He went on: “In playing, the child manipulates external phenomena in the service of the dream and invests chosen external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling” (p. 51). To this Winnicott (1971) added: “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (p. 54).

Let me finish with one last DLE. M. was the patient who taught me more than any other about DLEs. Each session with her was an abundant source of fascinating true tales of unconscious symbolism, and our work on them led to a profound transformation in her life. In the last moments of our last meeting, she told me about a beloved horse she had had as a child:

It was a stormy night. My “dear” mother tied Sussy to a tree in the orchard. I knew horses are very sensitive to cold, yet was uncertain whether I should go out or not, because it was such a terrible storm. I was about 10 years old. Eventually I went out. It was dark. It’s not like here, in the city, with lampposts spreading light. Total darkness, I couldn’t see a thing. I didn’t know how I could find her in the orchard. I called “Sussy!” and she replied “hee-hee-hee!” This is how I found her. I untied her and we walked back. Often when we walked, she would put her head on my shoulder and follow me. I put her in the stable and went home to bed.

This story, a story about a horse, sensitive to the cold, that the “dear,” not-good-enough mother tied to a tree, and that was rescued in the stormy dark night by little M., a story that ended our last meeting, I heard as a creative-playful expression of a real event, dream-like, whose topic was exactly what Winnicott talked about, what we strive for in our best moments: discovery of the self.

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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.

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.