Psychoanalytic Inquiry

A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals

ISSN: 0735-1690 (Print) 1940-9133 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsi20

Dreams as Fictional Remembering

Daniel Goldin

To cite this article: Daniel Goldin (2018) Dreams as Fictional Remembering, Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, 38:3, 222-233, DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2018.1430968

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2018.1430968

Published online: 20 Apr 2018.

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PSYCHOANALYTIC INQUIRY
2018, VOL. 38, NO. 3, 222–233
https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2018.1430968

Dreams as Fictional Remembering

Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D.

ABSTRACT
During dreaming, the brain inhibits input from the senses and blocks motor
output. The miracle is that, despite a lack of contact with the senses and a
temporary paralysis, the brain continues to generate densely meaningful
first-person scenarios. What justifies this purely imaginative procedure that
leaves people so vulnerable to predators? A great deal of neuroanatomical
evidence suggests that during REM sleep, the brain prunes exuberant
synaptic connections. In so doing, the brain simplifies overly complex
models of the world formed during the day to deal with noisy scenarios
and renders them more generalizable to the future. Freud likened the
mandate of dreaming to the task an illustrator faces in coming up with a
single illustration to represent the day’s headlines. In my view, this process
of condensation is not a method of disguise, as Freud believed, but the very
function of dreaming, and it has a temporal signature. Dreams reveal and
simplify past happenings by generating tight fictional narratives around
similar schemas, exposing by analogy the deep invariant structures of the
stories by which people organize their lives.

Humans have always sought to find meaning in dreams. These strange absurdist parables that take
shape in our skulls, when we lose control of our limbs and lose contact with our senses, seemed at
one time to be coded communications from God or at the least intimations of what is to come.
Dreams tell us things we don’t know. Their elements are symbolic, and we know that symbols point
elsewhere.
Freud (1895; Freud and Strachey, 1899) saw that elsewhere as lying in the past, rather than in the
future. He came to believe that the distorted imagery of dreams concealed prohibited desires and
repressed memories, the most recent leading by degrees to the most primal. The truth, he believed,
could be forced out through judicious interpretation.
Freud (1895) wondered not just about the meaning of the content of dreams but about the
process that generated that content. He argued that dreaming points to a primary, unbounded
hallucinatory form of thinking. In imagining the origins of this process, Freud summoned to mind a
hungry infant hallucinating his mother’s breast as the shortest, although ultimately unsatisfactory,
route to making his wish to be fed come true. Eventually the inadequacy of fantasy calls forth a
secondary process of mind, a logical reality-based mode that tolerates delay and encourages
gratification through motor activity: the infant makes things happen in a less instantaneous way
by crying, groping, etc. This is the how-so story of primary process and secondary process.
But Freud (1905) went one step further by proposing that the primary process fantasy mode that
controls dreaming and informs infancy remains in secret operation beneath adult rational menta-
tion, showing itself in slips of tongue as well as in jokes. He speculated that in everyday life, the two
modes of primary process and secondary process are a constant, transparent aspect of awareness. We
are forever closing the gap between fantasy and reality. Freud used the phrase reality-testing as a way
to explain how we close that gap. But as Loewald (2000) noted, reality-testing “may be understood

CONTACT Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D. daniel@danielgoldinpractice.com 1515 Hope Street, Suite 202, South Pasadena, CA
91030.
Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver
 DREAMS AS FICTIONAL REMEMBERING 223

more comprehensively as experiential imagining, of the testing of fantasy — its potential and
suitability for actualization” (p. 368, italics added).
Drawing largely on the work of Friston and his colleagues in the field of cognitive neuroscience, I
attempt to recast Freud’s notion of primary process and secondary process as message passing
between higher-order areas of the brain generating imaginative inferences about the world and
lower-order areas of the brain relaying prediction errors from the senses, a recursive process thought
to underlie consciousness.
I also look to Friston and Hobson’s (2012) conceptualization of dreaming as a way to “prune
exuberant synaptic connections” (p. 11). These theorists argued that we form overly complex models
of the world during the day to make more accurate imaginative inferences about noisy present-
moment happenings that both confirm and diverge from prior beliefs. Dreams make more parsi-
monious and generalizable an overparameterized model of reality (Hobson and Friston; 2012;
Tononi and Cirelli, 2014). The challenge is to translate this function of dreaming understood
scientifically as happening in a universal brain to a meaning-making allegorical process happening
in an individual mind.
In the universal brain, dreaming is a means of model optimization. In the individual mind,
dreaming is a fictional form of remembering, whose mandate is to condense and intensify. This
process of condensation and simplification is also always going on when we remember in waking life
with another, when we make associations during periods of aimless mind wandering and when we
create stories in general, but is at once freer and more constrained in dreaming, reaching deeper into
the past to create a tighter allegory for the future.
In updating Freud’s theory of primary process and dreaming and in comparing it to the work of
Friston and his colleagues, I intend to drop the idea of binding energy, drop the association of
primary process to the Id and to the unconscious and focus instead on Freud’s initial, revolutionary
notion: that imagination precedes what is going on out there, that it is often in competition with
what is going on out there, and that our immersive experience of the “real” is an ongoing, never-
ending compromise between fantasy and feedback from our senses. Understanding primary process
and secondary process as synergistic rather than dichotomous frees us from the constraints of
Freudian reality-morality. The individual does not outgrow an omnipotent fantasy-based mode of
thinking in preference to a superior reality-based mode. Fantasy is always one end of a process that
we continually refine through our lives.

A view from contemporary neuroscience: Consciousness as imaginative inference

Our story begins with Hermann Von Helmholtz. Helmholtz noticed in his study of optics that the
mind’s rich vision of the world, with its situated sense of depth and maintenance of color constancy and
object size, does not match the capacities of signals coming from the optic nerve, “which he believed
could only differ in hue, intensity and retinal position” (Adams, Shipp, and Friston, 2012, p. 623). From
here he surmised that the brain does a lot more than passively receive sensations. The brain infers the
causes of sensations: It thinks up what the world is behind the sensory information it receives. Rather
than functioning as a sensory antennae, the canonical view at the time, the brain generates fantasies and
hypotheses, which are tested against sensory evidence (Gregory, 1980; Friston and Frith, 2015).
I offer the following example. When an infant sees something with visual aspects that corresponds
to what we know to be eyes, a nose, and a mouth coming towards him, the infant, if he has had
sufficient prior experience with such events, will perceive these aspects not as a unique volatile mess
of optical sensations but as the familiar face of mother coming to kiss me goodnight. His brain infers
the hidden causes of his sensations based on prior models. How does this happen? Friston and his
colleagues propose that higher-order cortical areas generate predictions, inferring the causes of
sensory input, while lower-order areas of the brain in more direct contact with the senses relay
prediction errors. The brain’s goal is simply to minimize prediction errors, which we understand
experientially as surprise.
224 D. GOLDIN

In its efforts to minimize prediction errors, the brain employs two strategies. It can update its
predictions or imaginings in deference to ascending error messages or it can take action in the world
to make those imaginings come true, a strategy Friston and his colleagues call active inference
(Friston and Frith, 2015). This dual, ever-onward process of minimizing surprise occurs across
multiple domains and across multiple time-scales, operating behind simple perceptions and motor
acts, as well as behind our understanding of the motives and actions of others. Reality can be
understood as the point where surprise disappears altogether, a moving destination that keeps us
going but at which we never arrive.
The following passage provides a more experience-near way to understand the intertwining
process of perception (updating predictions) and action (active inference, which involves changing
the world to match predictions).
This process of navigating the world can be thought of as recurrent hypothesis testing (Helmholtz, 1866/1962;
Gregory, 1980). … To understand this intuitively, imagine feeling your way around a dark room: your careful
palpation of surfaces is informed at every point by some internal scene that is constructed inside your head.
This virtual reality guides, and is guided by, sensory feedback. [Friston and Hobson, 2012, p. 81]

Between the material layer of neurons and synapses and our first person experiences lies an
immaterial, abstract layer of schemas, beliefs or models.
The premise here is that we need to infer—and therefore predict—the causes of sensations to perceive them. For
example, to perceive a falling stone we have to appeal (implicitly) to a model of how objects move under
gravitational forces. Similarly, the perception of biological motion rests on a model of how that motion is caused.
This line of argument can be extended to the perception of intentions (of others or ourselves) necessary to explain
sensory trajectories; particularly those produced by communicative behaviour. [Friston and Frith, 2016, p. 131]

The theory recognizes two kinds of models or beliefs. The first are prior beliefs, relatively stable
generalizable principles or instructions for how things will happen based on a sedimentation of
knowledge over time. The second are posterior beliefs, drawn from prior beliefs but revised to serve
the unique predictive demands of the moment. ”Prior beliefs (April showers are common) are
combined with sensory evidence (dark clouds over the horizon) to produce a posterior belief (it is
likely to rain). This posterior belief is the expectation that maximizes … model evidence” (Hobson
and Friston, 2014, p. 5).

Remembering and narrative

To make use of these ideas in the psychoanalytic situation, we need to translate the vocabulary of the
universal brain to a vocabulary of the individual mind. Helmholtz, and later Friston and his
colleagues, envisioned the human creature as a scientist making hypotheses about states of the
world, then verifying these hypotheses and changing them to meet new data (as well as fulfilling
them through action). Without straying far from this theory, it is also possible to envision the human
creature as an artist, first imagining narrative possibilities, then doing things to realize these
possibilities while simultaneously altering his tentative imaginative predictions as the world responds
in surprising ways. This is a description of how stories proceed.
In the psychoanalytic situation, analyst and patient are more often than not engaged in the
process of grasping together the actions and sufferings of the patient into a story they work out
together in a way that makes sense to both. If the patient tells a version that is unpersuasive to the
analyst, the analyst may interpret or ask more or attempt an additional elaboration. If the patient is
unpersuaded by the analyst’s interpretation, he will, ideally, object or come up with a better
alternative. Eventually the two arrive at a way of imagining what happened in the patient’s life or
is happening between analyst and analysand in the room that feels both unexpected and inevitable,
neither clichéd nor too out there. The two re-experience what was at one time inchoate or confusing
or unshareable-seeming together. They mutualize the singular.
 DREAMS AS FICTIONAL REMEMBERING 225

This description of a psychoanalytic process focused on putting together narratives almost exactly
corresponds to the recursive message-passing Friston and his colleagues noted between descending
cortical areas generating a predictive model and ascending subcortical areas relaying prediction
errors—the two processes aiming at a mutually acceptable version of what is going on in the world
by minimizing surprise or, in this case, interpersonal discrepancy.
The main difference is that the neuronal process is theorized as predictive; the psychoanalytic
process focusses on a species of remembering, a formulating of past experience in a new explicit
storying way. The supervening goal is not prediction but recognition. We are making guesses about
unknown areas of a patient’s past experiences. We take turns generating these guesses and relaying
divergences until we find a version that is good enough for both of us—something we both
recognize, but which the patient recognizes in a more direct way—as something that has already
happened.
Herein lies our bridge between a theory situated on a level of brain processes making predictions
and a theory situated between two people exploring the past. Whether we are making predictions
about happenings right before us or seeking recognition in the past through retrospective dialogue
with another, we are inferring moving dynamic states that have beginnings, middles and ends that
can only be known through our participation. In the case of remembering this means finding a
match in our own mind or an analogue in the mind of another.
Paul Ricoeur (2004), in his magisterial final book Memory, History, Forgetting, rethought the
operation of memory by reviving an ancient opposition established first by Plato and Aristotle
between the image (eikon) and the imprint (tupos). The eikon conceptualizes memory as an effortful
act of remembering, an imagining. The tupos understands memory through an analogy to an imprint
in soft wax, something received passively from the world, rather than made. Ricoeur intertwined the
two ideas by making a distinction between imagination in remembering and imagination in fiction.
He wrote, “A threshold of inactuality is crossed between memory and fiction” (p. 49). Remembering
is an act of imagining that renders something that had once been. The eikon fits into the tupos.
Through the process of remembering, something that was, but is no longer, bursts into virtual being,
what Ricoeur referred to as the moment of recognition that separates remembering from fantasy.
It seems quite plausible to conceptualize remembering as a form of imagining that works
recursively with a recognition process that corresponds to an earlier passive memory, or tupos.
We infer happenings in the past in much the same way that Friston and his colleagues believe we
infer happenings in the present, by minimizing errors from some aspect of mind that lies closer to
what we are after, an aspect of mind that relays the mnemonic equivalent of prediction errors—what
we might call recognition errors.
Please recall that inference in the present refers to schemas or beliefs in the past. We have
followed Friston and his colleagues in understanding here-and-now inferences as organized around
prior beliefs as they confront sensory data in the moment. To repeat: “Prior beliefs (April showers
are common) are combined with sensory evidence (dark clouds over the horizon) to produce a
posterior belief (it is likely to rain)” (Hobson and Friston, 2014, p. 5).
Put in slightly different words, we apply a belief about rain happening in April in the past to add
weight to an inference in the moment. Beliefs tend to take narrative form. Our prior belief in April
showers will likely emerge as a particular, prototypical April shower, perhaps influenced by many
previous April showers, with a particular meaning, and the new context, “dark clouds over the
horizon,” will inspire a new guess about wet happenings also with particular meanings and with a
temporal contour. Our guesses are always more than just about the likelihood of rain. For this
reason, when speaking about the individual mind, rather than the universal brain, I prefer the term
narrative schema to belief.
We move backward into the past in a similar way to how we move forward in the present, by
traversing a series of associations that share similar narrative schemas. However, remembering
reverses the order by which we go from schema to schema. During the act of reflective remembering,
we start with the most immediate narrative schema or posterior belief (“it is likely to rain”), what
226 D. GOLDIN

Stern (2004) called the “present remembering context” (p. 99) and by a process of association move
toward episodes with similar schemas in the past (say, a prototypical rain that drenched us in
childhood or perhaps a rain that added a note of danger and adventure to a soccer game). We are
constrained during these reflective acts of remembering by the need to render something that
actually happened, and we are constrained by the need to be understood by a listener—our twofold
requirement of recognition. In this way, we refine narrative schemas retrospectively not so much to
make immediate inferences about hidden states of the world but to underpin longer-term, socially
meaningful tales that might influence our storying into the future. Before getting to how this process
becomes supercharged in dreams, which eliminates the constraints to render an actual happening or
to be understood by another, let us look more closely at the relationship between remembering,
association and narrative schemas during waking life.

Association and narrative schema

I offer the following example of an association that occurred during a relatively goalless period of
mind-wandering. I was in my car listening to an NPR interview with an artist who creates public
spaces designed to draw communities together. He had created a tented greenhouse in a public
park, stocked with exotic plants and butterflies, with the idea that people would swarm to the
area as a refuge from the urban environment. Instead, the neighborhood transformed his tent
into a concert space for Latin music. The artist added that he liked how the community had
claimed the space for its own use. As he spoke, I thought of a piece of sculpture at the Columbia
University campus near where I grew up: a giant rectangular snake-like metal tube on the lawn
opposite the business school building. As children, my brother and I would persuade my mother
to take us to the sculpture, and we would climb on the sculpture and slide down its hollow flat
sides. My mother thought it was a terrible piece of art, but we liked playing on it. Sometimes the
campus security guards would tell us to get off the sculpture. My mother was embarrassed during
these moments. But she kept taking us to the sculpture and letting us play on it. I think she
enjoyed these small acts of transgression, which we enacted at first in innocence and then in not-
quite innocence.
My association to the snake sculpture followed a narrative schema. We might describe this
schema roughly in propositional terms such as “it is good to take over public art for private use.”
I remembered my own little escapade as an instantiation of a narrative schema underlying the artist’s
talk on NPR. The association filled in a pre-existing outline and elaborated on it imaginatively in a
way checked by something actual in the past, similar to how our present-moment predictions are
entrained by sensory feedback from the sensorium.
The notion of a narrative schema is not a new one (Bucci, 1997; Stolorow and Atwood, 1992;
Lichtenberg, 2016). Kant (2009) used the term schema to describe a priori forms that underlie their
particular instantiations. He described the schema as “a universal procedure of the imagination for
providing a concept with its image” (p. 88).
Friston and his colleagues, in describing a similar concept of prior and posterior beliefs, stressed
their nonmagical but immaterial aspect, which they compared to the symmetry of an arrangement of
marbles (Hobson and Friston, 2014). Much like the symmetry of an arrangement of marbles, the
narrative schema has no existence outside the narrative that instantiates it, and yet it can be used to
generate other narratives and thus, in true Kantian fashion, has an a priori transcendent aspect that
allows it to attain new forms.
I emphasize that I conceptualize a narrative schema not in the semiotic tradition as a template
underlying all stories, but rather as the particular procedural instructions for a unique story that can
nonetheless be used to generate analogous stories, as in dreams, and retrieve old ones, as in
memories. Like DNA, these instructions are susceptible to epigenesis, always expressing themselves
somewhat differently as they come to life in a new context. Thus, a singular schema varying in its
actualization can be understood to underlie the similar but divergent stories behind an interview
 DREAMS AS FICTIONAL REMEMBERING 227

with an artist and my delight in climbing on a sculpture as a child. By consolidating these variants
across time-periods and across subjectivities we begin to sculpt a new schema for the future. Dreams,
which need not render an actual happening nor persuade a listener, are the apotheosis of the kind of
consolidation we find during periods of mind-wandering and storytelling.
Now imagine how this story of the snake sculpture might have emerged in the more directed
associations of a clinical situation. I might have come into the session worried about taking an idea
too far in a paper. I might wonder about my tendency to appropriate texts for my own creative use,
such as I am doing in this article. The feeling of slight fear mixed with creative excitement might
conjure up the memory of climbing on the snake sculpture with my brother under the gaze of my
mother. But we are reworking something here. We are letting the abstract contours or schemas of a
current situation guide our remembering of the past. We might consider how my mother was
a second-generation Russian Jewish immigrant, whose parents’ families were destroyed by the
holocaust. I believe my mother inhabited a world that was always potentially dangerous and slightly
foreign. And here I might move to an association of my mother fearfully contending with a gas
pump at a gas-station, sure that she was getting it wrong no matter how many times she did it. My
mother was not terrified of the world in the same way her mother was—and here I might imagine
the tight set of my grandmother’s jaw as she made her way through the supermarket—but she
couldn’t always make use of the culture. I believe she got a vicarious pleasure in watching my brother
and I scrambling over a pretentious piece of corporate art that felt alien to her, and I retained a
pleasure in appropriating cultural artifacts for my own use, but also absorbed some of my mother’s
fear of reprisal. Drawing upon another real session with my analyst, I can imagine my analyst
mentioning at this point something she had recently read in a biography of Freud describing his
intellectual advantage in being a recently assimilated Jew in Europe, someone who was sufficiently
within the culture to manipulate its signs and symbols but far enough outside it to have original
insight. These imaginative retrospective wanderings are better understood not as free associations
but as associations constrained by a need to explain a current situation, and doing so through
historical analogy with another person—in other words, following the twofold requirement of
recognition, internal and interpersonal. I am imagining episodes to put into a story, but these
episodes must incite the experience of recognition. I must feel them as having once been. And they
must also meet an analogous match in my analyst’s mind, a schema jumping across subjectivities.
Again, I am imagining a recursive process of imagining guided by the relaying of what we might call
recognition errors.

Dreaming
In the model proposed by Friston and Hobson (2012), dreams are understood first and foremost as a
special state of consciousness in which sensory input and motor output are gated by neuromodu-
latory mechanisms. One mostly doesn’t receive sensory information from the outside world when
one dreams and one mostly does not move, and yet one still functions in fantasy as an agentic self in
a virtual world.

From the perspective of consciousness research, these observations have something quite profound to say. First,
percepts are not driven by sensory input— they can arise during dreaming in the absence of any sensations. In
short, percepts are literally fantastic (from Greek phantastikos, able to create mental images, from phanta-
zesthai). [Hobson and Friston, 2014, p. 10]

In the same paper, the authors went on to note that dreams gate sensory input by slowing down
the secretions of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine, a process which
has the additional effect of suspending homeothermy. The brain literally overheats when we sleep, at
the same time leaving us vulnerable to predators. What is it about this purely imaginative state that
makes such risks worth it?
228 D. GOLDIN

Friston and Hobson and their colleagues proposed that dreaming reduces the complexity of
models built up during the day to deal with new information. On a neurobiological level, this
reduces to a pruning of exuberant synaptic connections. On an intermediate level of schemas or
models, we can understand the process in this way. During waking, we add parameters to prior
beliefs to maximize their accuracy in predicting novel situations. The revised beliefs better fit the
noisy happenings of the moment but become overly complex and less generalizable to future
experiences. Dreaming serves to apply Occam’s razor to an overly parameterized model.
How does this mandate of scientific parsimony in a universal brain map to the rich symbol-
drenched process of dreaming as it happens in a particular mind. Freud spoke of condensation as a
primary method dreams employ to elude a censoring aspect of mind. Dreams pull from many
sources to create a single, compressed dream element, an element he understood as overdetermined
in that it can be traced to multiple sources (Freud and Strachey, 1899). Freud saw condensation or
compression as a method of disguise, a way to distort the dream’s true purpose and source by
squeezing together into a single image multiple meanings emerging from multiple starting points. In
accordance with Friston and Hobson, we see condensation not as a method of disguise but as the
very function of dreaming, corresponding to a pruning of synaptic connections, a way to reduce and
intensify overly complex models or narrative schemas underlying the day’s experiences by generating
tight fictional parables dense with meaning for the future.
Freud (Freud and Strachey, 1899) likened the mandate of condensation to the task an illustrator
faces in coming up with a single illustration to represent the day’s headlines. Reflecting on this
analogy, I thought of a recent New Yorker cover that came out last summer, when the country was
roiling over police shootings of unarmed African Americans and reports of institutionalized racism
in Chicago’s police department. The cover depicted the simple image of a contemporary African
American family in swim suits on the beach, the father wearing Ray Bans and his little girl happily
eating an ice-cream cone amidst a vacationing crowd—perhaps in the Hamptons. The image merged
the iconic racist image of the naked savage family with a notion of placid assimilation in middle-class
White culture. As in a dream, the illustration compressed ideas from widely disparate, even contra-
dictory, sources. It takes the viewer a moment of reflection to realize the image is not meaningless
but rather intensely, densely meaningful.
Friston and Hobson (2012) were fond of describing waking consciousness as online dreaming,
fantasy constrained by feedback from the senses. The reverse is also true. Dreaming can be under-
stood as offline waking, fantasy unconstrained by the senses. How, then, is dreaming organized? The
view from cognitive neuroscience sees the process of creating and moving through a dream as the
same as that of creating and moving through reality, except that instead of changing our perceptions
and actions to minimize prediction errors drawn from contact with our senses (and by extension the
world), we change our perceptions and actions to minimize internal discrepancies and redundancies
within the updated models the brain uses to make its most recent inferences, responding to what we
might consider complexity errors.
As when we remember, which we conceptualized with Stern (2004) as always happening within a
present-remembering context, Hobson and Friston (2014) speculated that in dreaming the brain
refers first not to the distant prior beliefs it draws from in waking to form posterior beliefs, but quite
oppositely to the more complex posterior beliefs of the day, which it then consolidates with earlier,
more stable models. They wrote:

This may sound fanciful, but scientists do this every day: They spend a short amount of time earnestly
acquiring data from carefully designed experiments and then study those data using Bayesian model compar-
ison to test different hypotheses—until they find one that provides the most accurate but parsimonious
explanation. [In waking we acquire] experiential data through designed interactions with the environment
and then—in an altered state of (sleeping) consciousness—we finesse the complexity of those models, until
morning breaks. [p. 23]
 DREAMS AS FICTIONAL REMEMBERING 229

In the particular mind, a better analogy to the scientist finding a concise hypothesis to rope in
noisy data might be to a writer merging a rough exploratory first draft with the original outline or
concept that gave rise to it, putting together a more intensely evocative version that incorporates the
best improvements around a stable core.
Let us look at how this plays out in a real-world example. A female executive in my practice—let’s
call her Eleanor—had just survived the first wave of firings in a failing company, but she was not
sure she would survive the second wave. Eleanor’s work life had become miserable under a
frightened, irritable boss, and for the first time in twenty years, she was considering leaving her
profession to return to school. It is not incidental to the dream that this executive was a member of a
network of women who meet monthly to discuss their struggles rising within male-dominated
corporate culture.
In her dream, Eleanor was in an elevator going up and was experiencing a sense of panic. The
building was undergoing some terrible trauma; a bomb had gone off or a fire was consuming the
building or perhaps an earthquake had shaken the building’s internal supports, threatening to topple
it like Twin Towers. She desperately tried to escape the rising elevator by climbing the walls, only to
reach a glass ceiling. She pounded on the glass ceiling, ultimately breaking the glass to escape.
Dreams operate within intermediate areas of the brain, gating higher-order, cortical processes, as
well as lower-order processes connected more directly to the senses. By removing the constraints of
logic and the world, dreams allow for a kind of remembering unburdened by the need for a match of
recognition, either from another understanding mind, whether actual or anticipated, or from a more
inscription-like mnemonic process corresponding to an actual happening in the past. Instead the
brain creates unique scenarios that, despite their fictional nature, remain a form of remembering in
that they follow associatively, at least initially, similar narrative schemas that underlie waking
experiences. Dreams reveal and rework those schemas by the very act of putting them into new
fictional forms, bringing out and revising the deep anatomical structures of situations by elaborating
unique stories with condensed trajectories.
At the start of the aforementioned dream, the dreamer is in a state of panic about something
terrible happening around her that she knows only around the edges. She is trapped within the
threatened building but also separated from the action by being in an elevator. We might call this
the setup of the story, based upon a narrative schema that underlies her days at work, where she
is enclosed in an office aware, but only distantly so, of hidden backroom machinations and the
threat of mass layoffs. One could say that the dreamer invented the 9-11-like scenario as an
imaginative explanation for that feeling state. We have all envisioned the victims of Twin Towers
running to escape from they know not quite what. Finding herself in the elevator of a Twin-
Towers-like structure is a synthetic association, not unlike my moving to the snake-sculpture
from an NPR story about public art being turned to private use, except in the dream there is no
constraint to find a match in the dreamer’s own personal history. She can pull from anywhere.
There is also already a compressive aspect to this setup. No vague uncertain danger looms as in
her real work life. The danger is immediate. The story has to unfold during the tight temporal
parameters of an emergency.
So the dreamer now has a mission to escape. The dreamer must accomplish that mission at the
same time that she serves the deeper mandate of compressing far-flung ideas into new forms of
action to generate a more generalizable schema for the future. The dreamer starts climbing the walls
toward what turns out to be a glass ceiling, which does double duty, referring metaphorically to the
dreamer’s feminist principles and happier strivings in the past and at the same time posing a
concrete obstacle in the present. She breaks through the glass ceiling to get out, rather than to get
in, destroying a metaphor that organized her life until till now. Through immersive compressive
allegorical action, the dreamer experiences a paradigm shift necessary for waking.
The dreamer was very much in the position of a fiction writer capturing both the uncertainty of
life as lived and the inevitability of life as understood afterward. The dreamer split herself in two to
become both a protagonist faced with uncertain decisions and uncertain outcomes and at the same
230 D. GOLDIN

time an author constructing ad hoc allegorical scenarios around those actions, pulling together a
tight story meant to serve the future. The story of a dream is always an exciting uncertain story and
also always the story of the construction of the dream—which we might understand as compression
in action.

A dream—Background
A few months ago, my twin brother Josh woke up from a dream. He reached for a notepad he kept
by his bed for this purpose and wrote down as much as he could remember. I include these notes
exactly as he wrote them.
Josh told me that the dream came on the heels of what promised to be a great success in his
screenwriting career. (I myself understand the ins and outs of this career well, as Josh and I had for
many years worked together as a collaborative writing team.) Amazon had just agreed to green light
a television pilot he had written for them. Although materially successful, Josh is frustrated that most
of what he writes ends up unproduced. He feels blocked from a needed intercourse with an audience.
What’s more, enthusiasm in Hollywood can turn to disdain in heartbeat. Projects are always
unstable. Fed up, Josh told me that he had been recently plotting his exit from the business—at
which point, he got the call from Amazon that they would be shooting his pilot—and he fell into a
period of hope and fantasy.

The dream
I am looking out over the ocean from the top of a hill or from the deck of a house maybe, a distance above the
water in any event. I am watching a school of dolphins playing. They are beautiful, but it is not a surprising
sight for me, as I have seen dolphins playing near the beaches in Los Angeles fairly often.

As children, Josh and I loved dolphins. I believe they represented to us a kind of purity of play
and silent communion in the course of play, which we knew well with each other. Our father was an
artist, and much of our play as children took the form of making pretend art. We used to wake up
early in the morning and smudge photos in yesterday’s papers and color them in. We enjoyed
manipulating images. When I think of those times smudging newspaper images as children, I recall
the moment just before we started our work together, indulging a fantasy of creating something we
could never realize. The final product was always disappointing. The communing over the fantasy
was what it was all about—a feeling not unlike that of imagining an ideal production of a movie just
after learning it has been greenlit, recapitulated in fictional form as watching dolphins at play from a
distance.
As I am looking at this wonderful but fairly ordinary sight, I notice that one of these dolphins isn’t a dolphin.
And now I’m suddenly close to this particular dolphin. I am not surprised by this shift in perspective. I am like
the omniscient narrator in a novel. I have the right to go in close, if there is a reason to go in close. This dolphin
is different from the others in a subtle way, and I think—a porpoise. How unusual.

Now we have the next move in the dream, which requires a change in point of view. Josh is
suddenly among the school of dolphins. The earlier moment of placidly watching the dolphins slips
into irrelevance, like an earlier scene that an author marks for removal as he begins to understand
the story he is constructing in a different way. It is as though Josh now had never been on the deck.
The act of condensation does its work on the fly.
I am sensing in the ominous addition of a porpoise that the narrative schema of hope is falling
under the influence of a more stable, although more pessimistic, schema, whose nature we don’t
quite know yet. I believe we have a hint in the word porpoise, which sounds much like purpose. We
have inserted purpose into play. I think this partially because this is very much how it feels to write
for Hollywood: one plays, feels inspired, creates exciting drama, but at the end of the day (and even
at the beginning, really) one’s work serves the hidden agenda of the corporate representatives who
 DREAMS AS FICTIONAL REMEMBERING 231

function both as overseers and collaborators, an unholy mix so well formulated in the dream in
terms of a purpose-porpoise among cavorting dolphins.
I look closer. This is no porpoise. It is smooth-skinned (like a dolphin), but its face is pointed, lizard-like, and it
is a tropical green. As I stare at this reptilian porpoise, it stares back.

The theme of purpose amidst play cannot be sustained in all its dangerous implications in the form
of a porpoise, and so the story revises itself again. The porpoise takes on reptilian features. It doesn’t
literally transform, in the sense of morphing through special effects into a new form. It gets revised,
which means that the porpoise turns out not to have ever been a porpoise, a post hoc reconstruction
that we have seen before and know to be a common compressive strategy in dreaming.
Still staring at me, this alien creature creeps ashore. I guess the thing has little legs that allow it to leave the
water. Now the change in perspective has become meaningful to me not just as a descriptive device but in a
personal way that might have real consequences. We are connected by that stare—there is a mutual interest in it
—the beginnings of affection—but it is also a little scary. Why has this thing singled me out and what does it
want? I know I have singled it out too and wonder now if that was a mistake, to come in so close. I realize the
thing is a predator, and I think crocodile, a creature I know to be super fast. This thing could get me if its little
mind switched to an attack mode.

Josh understood in his writing up of this dream how his interest in this creature, an authorial
interest that caused him to move into a close up, also left him as a protagonist staring into the
creature’s eyes, connected emotionally to a creature that could physically destroy him.
The theory of active inference suggests that we take action both to test our imaginative predic-
tions and to do things that are likely to confirm them. In the case of putting together a dream, one is
not working toward making inferences about hidden states of the world based on errors relayed from
the senses. The senses are gated in dreams. In dreams, we are making inferences about hidden states
of the mind, and confirming and manipulating those happenings through virtual action, all with the
object of putting together an allegory whose narrative schema has predictive and evocative power
later on, upon waking. What is striking to me is that dreams are rarely about wishes, as Freud
believed. Things happen that we not only would not wish but downright dread. Why would we
generate frightening stories that make us uneasy? In waking life, we certainly rarely strive to frighten
ourselves. The answer is that the authorial force behind a dream is freed from the motivations that
animate a fully conscious human or, for that matter, the protagonist in the dream. The author’s sole
megalomaniacal mission is to build a good strong parable to inform future action, leaving the
protagonist sometimes at odds with his creator.
Locking eyes with the creature leads to another dramatic beat in the story, this time more of a
realization than an actual movement. Josh understands that his interest in the creature has generated
the creature’s interest in him. This mutual attachment is dangerous, as the creature is a primitive
reptile whose predatory instincts lie just underneath its thin affection. Here we have the metaphor of
Josh’s situation in Hollywood refined to an almost perfect allegory. He has captured the affective
interest of a collaborative predator who is mostly out for itself. Again, the dream action proceeds not
toward the fulfillment of a wish, not toward safety, but toward the refinement of a parable that best
represents Josh’s situation. The story moves relentlessly toward truth, albeit a truth that is tentative
and ever-evolving.
It is important to add that this reptilian alter-ego does not solely represent Hollywood. It is not a
symbol but a condensation. The dynamic between Josh and reptile-porpoise, has an aspect of
twinship I recognize from childhood and adult experiences with Josh. At times, Josh and I were
able to commune creatively, both in childhood and in adulthood. At other times, we bridled at being
so closely connected. In our writing career in Hollywood, we depended on our collaborating to make
a living, which meant that our creative communing often broke into conflict about what narrative
idea could pass the corporate gate-keepers, and which also meant that we were stuck together no
matter how intense our differences by a bond of money. This idea of fearing to pull away from a not-
entirely-desired bond has roots in an aspect of his relationship to me, although it is only an aspect of
232 D. GOLDIN

our relationship, and I believe it is drawn into the story more as a potent way to know what is going
on right now and pervasively in his world of Hollywood.
The thing comes right up to me. I decide to be friendly. I won’t show how scared I am. I put out my hand and
touch its smooth snout. It makes a purring sound, like a cat, but louder, a rich, throaty purring more like what
one would imagine might come from a lion. The creature loves me … for now. It crawls further towards me
and puts its smooth snout to my neck. The purring gets louder. As long as it is purring, I think, I’m safe. It loves
me. But it is a feral creature, and I know its feelings could change without much cause. The creature’s snout is
now pressed to my soft neck. I think, I must keep it purring. The creature has a big animal weight. I think, if just
I can keep it purring, I’m safe. … And maybe, if I am careful and sly, I can shift it off me, really slowly so it doesn’t
notice I am rejecting it. But as I start to move it gently, gently off of me, I feel the creature changing, I know its
feelings are shifting. Some new terrible instinct is taking over. So I bring the creature back to me, its damp face
pressed against my neck.

Now I am walking with this alien creature stuck to me. It loves me. I like feeling its love. But with this feeling of
being loved comes a sense of terrible danger that this creature’s love could switch any second not to hate, but to
something automatic and brutal that will tear me to pieces.

Friston and Hobson (2012) wondered why we tend to forget our dreams. They speculated that we
forget because dreams contain no new information. Another way to look at it is that dreams are in
the business of generating schemas that can be used to create real stories upon waking. The story of
the creation of a schema—the dream itself—can be discarded like a husk. A related question is: Why
do we remember some dreams and not others? Waking from nightmares is a persistent symptom of
PTSD, as Hopkins (2016) noted in his own discussion of Friston and Hobson’s work. One might
speculate that a person suffering from the aftermath of overwhelming stress, such as a near-death
experience that “shatters the absolutisms of everyday life” (Stolorow, 1999, p. 468), might find it
impossible to condense stable narrative schemas from the past with a new narrative schema
revolving around existential collapse. The two schemas simply cannot be made to conform. The
victim is shocked into waking by the fictionalizing attempt, just as he is shocked into a sleep-like
trance in the face of the original trauma. To a lesser degree, perhaps the dreams that we remember
are failures of consolidation that require additional interpretation and reworking, as perhaps this
dream does.
I am walking now along a country road to a friend’s house. A couple lives there. No one I know in real life, but
I know I am heading to the house of a couple. My thinking goes like this: I need witnesses. I need someone to
be with me when I detach the creature from me. Because if there is someone with me when I detach this
creature, and the creature turns and tries to rip me to shreds, that someone would be there to help me kill the
thing.

Who is this mysterious couple? It is tempting for anyone versed in the history of psychoanalytic
epistemology to guess that it refers to the primal couple, mother and father, representing a wish to
return to the womb-like safety of home. But if we understand this couple as formed through
condensation, then we might speculate that it is both the primal couple and a present day ideal of
coupleness related, perhaps, to Josh’s own marriage. In any event, Josh’s tentative plan of murder,
echoing his earlier scheme to abandon Hollywood, seems to depend on an alliance with people he
can trust to recognize his predicament. This situation of needing to be recognized to disengage from
a potentially dangerous attachment no doubt reaches past Hollywood into many interpersonal
situations, including family relationships and Cain-and-Abel aspects of his relationship to me,
although I would contend that Hollywood remains the main target.
I walk slowly with this loving creature on me, prepared to kill it, not wanting to, feeling duplicitous about the
idea even, but prepared to kill it if I have to kill it.

This final beat brings the story to its densest point of condensation without concluding it,
drawing from the past and the present to create an analogue for Josh’s uncertain situation as he
moves into the future.
 DREAMS AS FICTIONAL REMEMBERING 233

Conclusion
Following Friston and his colleagues, I view primary process and secondary process as recursive
message-passing between higher-level areas of the brain inferring the hidden causes of sensations—
imagining, wanting, predicting—and lower-level areas relaying prediction errors or divergences. We
conceptualize dreaming as a form of remembering unconstrained by the need to recognize its
renderings as having actually happened in the past. Instead, a dream generates and manipulates a
condensed fictional analogue. On a neurological level, a dream prunes exuberant synaptic connec-
tions. On an intermediate abstract level, a dream compresses recent overparameterized narrative
schemas with more stable narrative schemas from the more distant past to create an updated but
concise model generalizable to the future. On the level of lived experience, a dream casts a wide net
of associations to produce a tight mnemonic parable in real time.

Notes on contributor
Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D., is a graduate of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He is an
associate editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and associate book editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self
Psychology. He has a private practice in Los Angeles, California.

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