ON DREAMS: DISCUSSION OF PAUL LIPPMANN'S PAPER “THE CANARY IN THE MIND”1

Abstract

Paul Lippmanns paper ‘‘The Canary in the Mind’’ (preceding paper in this issue) is in the psychoanalytic tradition in that it encourages us to take seriously—and also playfully—the tensions between what we believe we know and what we fail to see. Much as Bion (1967) warned against memory and desire as forces occluding perceptual possibilities, he also warned against believing too firmly in our theories or conceptual constructs and in this way inhibiting our own learning (Bion, 1977). So then, we come up against this issue of the dream that Paul so delightfully captures in his image of the ‘‘canary in the mind’’. I found myself playing with this metaphor, thinking first of the dream itself as a canary in the mind, warning against whatever might become lost or occluded if we fail to give it due thought and respect. But then, I saw that that is not really what Paul is pointing to. Rather, he is showing us how dreams, themselves, come to carry meanings within a culture and how we can see the collective fate of our unconscious selves cast against the light of how dreams are faring in our more public lives and mind. Paul points out to us how the virtual dream, in the form of the external screen, is coming to the forefront in our culture, in this way obscuring and demeaning the more private, more personal screen of the individual dream. He suggests that the dream is falling to the same fate as other commodities we hold dear, that we fail to treasure through greed, lack of foresight, and a narrowing of vision. In this culture where we use—and abuse—our resources and fail to provide ourselves sufficient space or time to reflect on our mutual coexistence and interdependence, and thus to more fully appreciate our debts and experience our gratitude, we are faced with the consequences of this abuse at every turn. We see before us myriad manifestations of the limitations of our ability to control nature, as well as the various prices we pay for those attempts. So, then, the lion in the zoo faces us with a tamed, demeaned, and diminished image of the lion in nature. In this way, it represents our capacity to harness the forces of nature, but also our incapacity to come