Nocturnes On Listening to Dreams

Imagine sitting in on an advanced seminar on dreams. One hundred years after Freud, what is left to say? This is the challenge that Paul Lippmann meets in a surprisingly fresh way. Perhaps we should stop trying to say anything, he contends, and simply go back to listening to dreams. 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. Only when we approach dreams respectfully - only when we understand them as offering a safe place in which to play with multiple possibilities of thought and action, to make bold metaphorical leaps, to join up with the unruly side of one's mind, and to make contact with one's creativity - do we access their deeper healing potential. A senior training analyst and distinguished teacher, 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.Lippmann, Paul is the author of 'Nocturnes On Listening to Dreams' with ISBN 9780881633863 and ISBN 0881633860.