Play Space: I find that I often use my dreams as play spaces where I am working on a task—such as writing or preparing a lecture. Sometimes, I am fortunate. The task I engage in the “play space” of my dream is related to the “non-playful” task in which I am engaged when awake. For instance, my dream about Jim’s experience on Monhegan Island turned into the narrative I offer in this essay. I often get ideas for a book or essay I am writing from the fertile and “wide-open” play spaces that are created in my dreams.
Unfortunately, sometimes my play space work ends up being unrelated to the task I am facing when I am awake. When awake, I must acknowledge that the “important” task in which I am engaged in a dream has no base in Reality. For example, I wake up with great idea for a book I am writing and then realize that I am not writing this book! Or I do extensive editing of a section of manuscript, only to wake up realizing that this manuscript doesn’t exist in the waking world.
It is interesting for me to note that my dreams that are most “playful” tend to relate to real life projects, while the more “serious” work I do in my dreams tend to be of no consequence and little relevance to my actual daytime interests and commitments. I suspect that my “serious”/meaningless dream-based tasks are in the business of teaching me that I sometimes take myself and my projects too seriously. I need to “relax” and enjoy the process—perhaps like Jim hopes will occur in the art studios he has established. Hopefully, these studios will be “play spaces,” Just as the office where I write books will continue to serve as a “play space” for me.
Imagery and Cognition
I wish to push the matter of dream-functioning a bit further and in doing so will be turning as I have in other essays in this series to psychoanalytically oriented research conducted by George Klein at New York University. In one of his many essays, Klein (1967) introduced an interesting concept regarding the dynamic unconscious processes operating deep in our psyche. He described a process called Peremptory Ideation that I have suggested in several essays may relate to the nature and content of our dreams.
As I have mentioned, Klein proposed that in our internal world (psyche), we create a specific idea or image that begins to “travel” around our psyche (head and heart). It operates as a strange attractor, recruiting thoughts, feelings and behaviors as it courses through our psyche. This train, which is already filled with ideas and images, picks up fragments of unconsciously held material (memories, feelings, and thoughts) along the way. The ideational train operates much like the avalanche, pothole, and other forms of “strange attractors”. The train becomes increasingly rich and emotionally powerful as it picks up new intra-psychic material. It gains increasing energy from this unconscious material.
At some point, this ideation begins to pull in material from outside the psyche. External events suddenly take on greater saliency (more emotional power and vividness). This may be a point when our objects of value gain even greater saliency, for they are aligned with and are picked up by the moving psychic train. Klein suggested that this ideation takes priority when valuing, attending, and remembering in the external world. It assumes a commanding (“peremptory”) presence.
A positive (reinforcing) loop is created, with the external material now joining the interior material. They all cluster around the original (often primitive) ideation. Vibrance is to be found in their clustering. There is a strong pull—a strange attractor—that leads to patterning of our behavior. As the train travels once again to a specific unconscious place, it will pull for specific behavior in our waking life, thus adding to the repetition of behavior, hopes, and fears. Furthermore, there is good reason to believe that our dreams participate in this ideational process. The dream content may hitch a ride on the train or even at times gets the train moving with some deeply motivating image in the dream serving as a trigger point.
