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I don't like to dream (or to recall that I've dreamt); if it was a bad dream it darkens my awakening; if it was sweet it tears me to pieces when it stops: I could never imagine a sleep utopia filled with dreams, with sweet dreams.
-Roland Barthes, The Neutral
IF NO ONE HAD ever dreamt, if dreaming was something that nobody had ever done or ever remembered, then the way we describe prophecy, reality, skepticism, memory, desire, identity, irrationality, and sleep-to take the more obvious examples-would be quite different. And to imagine what kind of difference the absence or nonexistence of the dream would make to our lives-what effect it might have had, for example, on the invention of photography, or on the sense we made of sleeping-seems baffling. So much seems to depend on the fact of our dreaming, or rather on our capacity to remember and represent our dreams. The dream as example, the dream as analogy, the dream as material for interpretation, the dream as vitalizing enigma, the dream as key, the dream as clue to something essential about ourselves and our fate: all of these point to the striking cultural importance of dreaming and the telling of dreams. How dreaming fits into so-called waking life, what the dreamer has to do with the rest of a person's activities, what if any significance should be ascribed to dreams-these are issues about which most, if not all, cultures have something quite forceful to say.
People tend to speak about dreaming as something that somehow matters to them. Dreams, to adapt Levi-Strauss's formulation, are good to think with. I want to speculate on why this might be the case. What are we talking about when we talk about dreams? More precisely, why do talking and writing about dreams get people talking and writing? If, for example, the figure traditionally referred to in psychoanalytic theory as The Dreamer was a character in a novel, what could the novelist-the dream-theorist-use him to do or to give voice to? The Dreamer as hero-the heroism of dreaming-is like a permission, or an invitation, or even an incitement to say certain things that are otherwise difficult to articulate. The fact that we dream is an opportunity to describe...