Nocturnes

On Listening to Dreams

Paul Lippmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317771166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Nocturnes, literally music for the night, is a delightfully impressionistic investigation into everything that is not known, and perhaps can never be known, about dreams. Rather than espousing yet another strategy of dream interpretation, Lippmann proffers a naturalistic approach appreciative of the playful, complex, even zany creativity embodied in dreams. He urges us, that is, to apprehend dreams on their own terms, in a manner that enables patients actually to experience the unconscious in its radical difference from waking thought.

Lippmann delivers on his agenda lightly, with a sense of humor and practicality that will engage lay readers as well as analysts and therapists. He takes up questions of general interest that challenge us to reorient our thinking about dreams: How do children learn about dreams and their telling? Why are most dreams forgotten? How may we understand dreams about sleeping and waking, even dreams about dreaming? And he reengages issues of perennial interest to analytic therapists: dream disguise, dream forgetting, the "companionship" of dreams, the neurotic dream expert, and the therapist's management of his or her own anxiety when patients report their dreams."Oh, I had a dream last night, " the patient remembers. Too often, observes Lippmann, this remark signals the beginning of an unfortunate struggle, as the patient is called on to relate something that changes when it is put into words, the analyst is put on the spot to come up with an interpretation, and both are asked to extract something immediately useful - and lately, cost effective - from something that partakes of magic and mystery. How silly this ritual is, Lippmann argues, and how alien to the nature of the dream itself. After reading Nocturnes, no clinician, from the novice to the most senior, will hear the words "Oh, I had a dream last night" in quite the same way.

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INTRODUCTION

When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.

–John Muir

She speaks quietly of her dream, a bit embarrassed. “There is a road that goes through the woods. It’s a dirt road. A crowd of people are on one side and they’re all looking at a dead deer on the side of the road.” She looks at her hands and her voice becomes thinner. “Blood all over the road. It’s not clear but I think it was hit by a car, and they want me to cut it up and distribute the pieces for food. Something about doing it fairly. They know I’m a doctor and they want me to do the carving.” She looks over at me briefly and says, “But I need someone to help, to take off the hide. I don’t feel right about it. But I’m glad they ask me. I think I can see it’s a female. I know some of the people.” She looks over again, smiles a small smile, and shrugs, as if to say “Beats me.”

We have known each other for most of a year and often talk about dreams. We work together in analytic psychotherapy. The patient is a tall, willowy, dreamy woman in her late forties, but with a shyness and naivete of a woman much younger. For many years, she has been a respected physician. And I am a psychologist-psychoanalyst in my mid sixties, thin, graying, Jewish, a bit rough around the edges. We meet twice weekly in 50-minute sessions in my office in the small town of Stockbridge, in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The psychotherapy is of the psychoanalytic variety, with an interpersonal shading. She is a troubled, often terrified, and yet tender soul–quiet, gentle, intelligent, inward. Secretly and guiltily, she is obsessed with things corrupt, sexual, and violent. Occasionally, she feels she is losing her mind, for a day or two at a time, especially when she is unable to survive the struggle between inner violent chaos and outward softness. Her guilt is monumental. She has been trying hard to hold her mind, herself, and her family together following the stillbirth of her daughter’s infant and the sudden death of one of her favorite patients. She is possessed of a deeply silent and growing disappointment in life and in the possibilities of love. In her dreams, we have found a way to explore her troubled heart. In dreams, we have found a way to struggle through perilous times and to begin to weigh the meanings of things. Dreams can provide a way to look at things a bit “from the side” and thus permit breathing space for some terrible experiences that cannot be faced head-on.

There is a way of being with dreams that can be helpful to people in trouble. If one can develop a respectful capacity to allow the mind to play, if one does not force one’s own opinions and thus take up too much psychological room at the expense of the patient or the dream, if one can be a naturalist and follow a dream and a dreamer wherever they lead, then it is often possible for dreams to unfold themselves in therapy and to reveal untold mysteries of the human heart. Often this unfolding can lead the way in easing psychological suffering. Psychoanalytic therapy, I believe, is particularly well suited to make good use of dreams because it respects the complexity of human experience, because it is rooted in an appreciation of the unconscious dimensions of mind, and because, at its best, it tries to listen deeply without knowing too quickly.

It is of interest that in our field, fewer and fewer psychoanalytic therapists use dreams well. Once upon a time, dreams were at the center of psychoanalysis. Now, in our journals and at our meetings, dreams are rarely discussed. And when they are, they seem to be used exclusively to elaborate aspects of the relationship between patient and therapist, to elaborate aspects of transference themes. Although often interesting and even useful, this approach hardly makes full use of the potential of dreams to open the discussion to unexpected vistas.

In what follows, I discuss the various phases in the 100-year relationship between dreams and psychoanalytic therapy in ways that I hope can renew interest in the dream and that can raise questions about the direction of contemporary psychoanalytic therapy.

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

At night, in sleep, we dream. The mind, like heart and lungs, never stopping; whether asleep alone or in another’s arms, whether happy or sad, mad or sane, rich or poor, the dreams pour forth in extraordinary buds and blossoms of creative thought. Within this most common, natural, universal occurrence, there is an endless variety and uniqueness that still causes me wonder and amazement.

A lot of work goes into these flowers of originality. There is evidence that everyone (REM) dreams for about 2 hours each night–more for infants, less for the elderly–whether the dreams are remembered or not. Therefore, in a week, a person averages about 15 hours of dreams, in a year, over 700 hours, and, over an 80-year lifespan, over 60,000 hours of dreaming. That amounts to almost 7 years of full-time dreaming in a lifetime. Or, if one thinks of time divided into the 40-hour work week, one dreams, on the average, for 25 years of work-week time. Worth a gold watch.

And yet, this most commonplace and extraordinary experience remains a mystery. Despite thousands of years of probing exploration, despite the efforts of philosophers and scientists, of machine and imagination, the mystery of dreams continues to fascinate and puzzle. From ancient biblical desert to fin-de-siècle Vienna, from the thrones of pharaohs to the couches of analysts, from Torah through Talmud to Traumdeutung, the dream continues to tease as it eludes our best efforts to grasp its essential nature, its purpose, its meaning.

Pursued though time, through night’s experience, through day’s fading memory, the dream slips away into its own realm: “Catch me if you can.” Why so elusive? Why, despite thousands of years of effort, do we remain so mystified? It is truly amazing that the dream should have resisted for so long the weighty impact of millennia of interpretation, theory, superstition, and dogma. There is a crucial quality of “unwilled freedom” to be found in the construction and experience of dreams. We need enter the dream’s own realm with the lightness and respect that are owed it. That is, we have to consider how, in exploring the mystery of dreams and their potential use in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, we may do so without harming the essential experience of the lightness of dreaming.

A COUNTRY ROAD

Strolling, with my sweet yellow Lab, Odessa, on a dirt road through the woods near my home, puts me in mind of the experience of engaging with dreams in psychotherapy. Along the way, there is an extraordinary proliferation of vegetation: mosses, ferns, wild plants of every variety, berry bushes, grasses, small and large trees, in greens of every possible shade, all redolent with a recent rain’s dampness. And hidden from view, announced only by the call of birds, above and beneath and behind the visible, lies an entire universe of living, breathing nature. Here and there I stop and look closely at a clump of mosses or a pattern of leaves or the light playing on two small yellow wildflowers. Time holds its breath and the world is instantly and completely encompassed in a small leaf and the minute red spider crawling along its stem. I look more closely in the vicinity of the leaf and see a few and then many more tiny red spiders scurrying about–a newly hatched family of baby red spiders.

Odessa stops a few yards away, farther into the woods, and is sniffing and nuzzling some grasses. I watch her a moment, speckles of sun around her; then she looks up and we decide to continue on to the nearby pond. She trots over and we near the bend in the road where what lies ahead is now hidden from view. My senses quicken, but I know that if there is a deer, a bear, or a coyote or other animal around the bend, Odessa will know about it first. So I keep half an eye on her as we continue. A month earlier, we had surprised a doe and her fawn at just this spot and we all took a good look at and a good smell of each other for long minutes before the deer and its young slowly walked off and my dog barked a farewell. But this time, there is no one on the road. We see the pond and it is time for Odessa, named for that city on the Black Sea where some of our family once lived, to take a swim and for me to look at the swirling fish under the lily pads. On such a walk, anything can happen; one can discover unknown worlds in an instant and surprises around the bend.

This sort of experience, of course, is not restricted to the countryside. A walk in the city, where nature is mostly of the human variety, can also open to surprises and discoveries. Anything can happen–a new love around the corner, a catastrophe down the street, a store window showing a piece of life long forgotten, a tiny piece of sky, a moment of slapstick. The city can be dreamlike, beyond one’s will, a theater of happenings. Country or city, on the ocean or in the mountains, out of doors or in bed, if one’s mind is open to each moment’s chances, each moment’s changes then one is in that frame of mind that is favorable for engaging well with dreams.

Dreams too are filled with unwilled surprises, sudden focusings, unfocusings. The experience of being told the dream can engage us in imagining its events and its moods, in discovering together its nature, its surfaces and hidden recesses, its flora and fauna, its surprises. The delight in working on dreams can be like the very discovery of nature. Why, then, should working with dreams in psychotherapy so often take place in an atmosphere of test and constriction? The development of this question and some possible remedies take up much of this book.

ON A DREAM OF A RIVER

It is late in a summer vacation, and I am in a canoe with my wife, Frances, on the saltwater marshes of the Pamet River on Cape Cod. We drift lazily with the current around a long curve. The tall green and yellow grasses and reeds conceal all but the cloudless blue sky above and the green-gray-blue of the moving river below.

Suddenly, a hidden great blue heron startles us from our dreaminess with a rush of beating wings, as it explodes from the tall grasses, whooshes up and away, then turns and soars off, graceful wings spread wide, to a further part of the river. Perhaps we’ll meet again later on.

How much like dreams are birds. They float in and out of our awareness. They fly where they will without our will involved. They float in air, the original luftsmenschen. But at times also, dreams are like fish. Fish live outside our immediate awareness in all layers of the sea, from the surface to the depths. Sometimes we catch one, mostly they go their own way, like dreams. Sometimes I have dreamed about birds and sometimes about fish. But can you imagine how pleased I was when I had a dream of a flying fish, emerging from the sea in short bursts of flight, fins spread like tight wings. It then dove back under the surface, and then up through the air again and under sea again until it flew above the dream boat I was in and hovered overhead for magical moments. I awoke with the thought that I might, after all, be dreaming about dreams. Of course, I was in fact dreaming about a flying fish (the dream experience, the manifest content) and not about dreams (an interpretation, an hypothesis, a latent content).

My earliest memory is of watching clouds. Outdoors in a crib or carriage, a soft breeze, looking up to the sky–so goes the memory–I saw clouds and watched and watched. Their movements, their shapes, their inner spaces and textures, their changes, all held my deep attention for long moments. I played with them in mind. I still marvel at their design. In an airplane, thousands of feet high, above the clouds, I see them from above. Miraculous perspectives. I imagine only in dreams could our ancestors, in dream flight, approach such a view from above the clouds. Perhaps we sometimes live what our ancestors could only dream. Perhaps experiences in our lives fulfill their dream wishes, as well as their nightmares. Perhaps our dream wishes and our nightmares are glimpses of what future generations may in fact experience in their daily lives. Is it possible that dreams glimpse long-ago and far-future experience? Do the generations touch in dreams? Watching the clouds, walking in nature, seeing a remarkable bird emerge from its own place, all provide spaciousness akin to the feeling of listening to and working with dreams.

NOT ALL “DREAMS” ARE DREAMS

Peruse the book section of your favorite newspaper over a period of weeks, or browse through a bookstore, and you will be sure to find many books with the word “dream” in the title. These books are not about “dreaming” in our specific sense, but use the word as a general substitute for “wish” or “hope” or “fantasy” or “ideal” or “imagination” as in “The American Dream” or “Hoop Dreams” or “Dreams of a Seaside Resort” or “Capitalism: The Fading Dream” or “Women Who Dream of Independence.” And in general conversation, one hears phrases like: “I never dreamed he would ask me out,” or “Can you dream up a plan for us?” or “You don’t have to take me seriously; I was only dreaming out loud,” or “My dream came true! Two tickets to the playoffs!” or “He broke my heart; the dream is over,” or “The Dream Team is in the Olympics.”

But book titles, idioms, and catch phrases aside, talking about dreams as dreams, about the ordinary and regular experience of nighttime, is relatively rare in our culture. To be sure, if directly asked about dreams, or if the topic is overtly introduced, many people are quite forthcoming, interested, willing to talk about them, to ask about them, or are curious about the latest research. This observation does not apply to persons connected with psychoanalytic therapy as analysts or patients or their intimates. Such persons often seem to believe that dreams are like dirty secrets or might reveal pathology and are best kept to themselves or for their therapists’ ears only. Although most people gladly open up about dreams if invited to talk about them, dreams, in most of our culture, do not enter ordinary conversation spontaneously. At school, at work, at the mall, at the gym, on the farm, it is rare to hear people talk about their nightly imageful musings. Perhaps because of their puzzling quality, their extremely personal and idiomatic nature, the relative importance of material things in waking communication, or a shyness about irrational matters–whatever the cause–dreams as dreams remain a topic most often unspoken in our culture. Given the ordinariness and ubiquity of dreams, this silence is all the more striking.

Let us contrast this curious reticence–unless invited–with the observation that in other cultures and at other times, talking together about dreams was a most ordinary and common occurrence. Especially in nonindustrial cultures, dream talk was common stuff, as people attempted to fathom their meanings and to better understand their lives–past, present, and especially, future. Moreover, tucked away within our own surface culture are many communities and persons where dream talk is still important. A middle-aged mother and sometime painter, of Haitian origin, living in South Florida, said in our conversation about the relationship between dreams and Haitian art, “Not a day goes by without somebody talking about a dream somebody had. It would be like a day without a drink of water to not hear and talk about somebody’s dream. How would you ever know what’s going on?”

I asked an elderly Italian man in Tuscany about the way dreams are regarded in his village. He spoke at length about dreams as predictors for his wife, his mother, and his grandmother. “Dreams tell the future, definitely,” he said. “But in Pisa,” where his wife came from, “dreams always mean the opposite of what they say. In the South,” he went on, “dreams come from the Devil, so you have to be careful. You have to watch for the ‘evil eye.’” The twinkle in his eye made it hard for me to discern how much he was kidding the American psychologist. He is the same person who said, with the same twinkle, “My father used to say that in America–I mean no disrespect–in America, you moved very quickly from a state of barbarism to a state of decadence, and in so doing, you passed over what here, in Italy, we call…”–here he paused as though searching for just the right word–“what we call… civilization.” Talking about dreams was evidently part of what he meant by “civilization.”

CHILDHOOD DREAMS

I do not come to dreams lightly, although I try to teach a kind of playfulness in working with them. When I was a child, many of my dreams frightened me enormously. I dreamed continuously of imagined Holocaust events, or so it seems to me in retrospect. During the daytime, in the early 1940s, my father–who worked for an organization called the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, or HIAS–had early access to records of family members forced into various concentration camps, which ones were dead, which ones still alive. Tormented, he wanted desperately to travel back to Europe to rescue beloved sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends. With equal desperation, my efforts were to keep him with us in America–alive and safe–even if staying meant his being beside himself and powerless with the impact of early knowledge of the growing nightmare in Europe.

I remember some terrible evenings when he sat in black silence tearing at his clothes, covering his head in ashes, weeping bitterly, a letter in front of him on the kitchen table, telling of yet another murdered sister or brother. At night, I would awaken from terrible concentration camp dreams to make sure my father was asleep in the bed next to me, that he hadn’t slipped away in the night to travel to Poland. I feared going back to sleep. I feared dreaming. If dreams were to protect sleep, I wished for neither. A few years later, when I slept in my own bed, I developed the habit of keeping a small radio under the covers right next to my ear. All night it played, drowning out dreams. But Holocaust dreams continued to slip through nonetheless. Murder, blood, horror beyond description. I visited, in my dreams, alleyway after alleyway in camp after camp as I ran after my father, seeing what he saw, as best a child could–every oven, every emaciated man and woman, every Nazi, every possible abomination and humiliation, every bloody crime against every Jew. I hated my dreams. I hated the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 WISHES AND DREAMS
• 3 DREAMS FROM THE DAWN OF TIME
• 4 A STORY OF DREAMS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
• 5 A NATURALIST APPROACH TO DREAMS
• 6 ON DREAM DISGUISE
• 7 THE DREAM LISTENERS
• 8 WHEN THE ANALYST’S NEUROTIC STYLE MEETS THE DREAM
• 9 A CHILD’S QUESTION: “WHERE DO DREAMS COME FROM?”
• 10 APPLE TREE DREAMS: ON THE ECOLOGY OF UNREMEMBERED DREAMS
• 11 ON THE PRIVATE NATURE OF DREAMS
• 12 ON THE FATE OF REMEMBERED DREAMS
• 13 WAKING AND SLEEPING
• 14 WHY USE DREAMS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY?
• 15 THE COMPANIONSHIP OF DREAMS
• 16 ON TWO KINDS OF DREAMS
• 17 ON FREEDOM AND DREAMS
• REFERENCES
• SUGGESTED READING
• INDEX