ABSTRACT
W. R. Bion approached the problem of dreams from different directions at the same time, as a psychoanalyst and before that. For Sigmund Freud dreams had two main functions: one was that of safeguarding the dream. The other function that Freud ascribed to dreams was that of managing, digesting childhood sexual desires—which had been repressed because they were inacceptable. Freud said that at the core of every dream there was a repressed childhood desire. Freud speaks of the dream as something that is part of night-time thinking, and in the same context, he also talks about unconscious wakeful thinking. For Bion the idea of unconscious wakeful thinking was a very important idea because it allowed one to think of what James Joyce, in Ulysses and later in many other texts, describes as a “stream of consciousness”. Bion had the idea of a stream of consciousness, not in the sense of being unconscious, but in the sense of not being aware.
