ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of reverie to discuss the spectator's 'intersubjective aesthetic experience' within the moving image encounter, examining Bion's claim that dreaming is an action that occurs as 'unconscious waking thought'. It argues that such a modality of dreaming works similarly within moving image spectatorship through the emotional experience of wandering reverie. The chapter takes up the wandering quality of reverie that Bion and Bergstein refer to and considers more specifically how it might work as a type of wandering (in terms of psychic thought) and as a proto-mental (thought and felt) spacing in the cinematic field via the work of Ferro and Civitarese (2015). The notion of wandering is used in the chapter to denote the function of Bion's reverie and to show a possible way in which it works as its own spacing within cinema, mimicking the structure and affect of aesthetic experience (and any potential transformation) within the analytic situation.
