ABSTRACT
The mystery of dreams is deeply connected with the birth of experience. The core of a dream is an emotional experience and the obscurity and difficulties inherent in dream meaning are those of emotional life itself. Psychoanalysis has long had a propensity to make one set of experiences primary and others secondary, when they might interweave from near the outset. For W. R. Bion, dreaming played a role in condensing, storing, narrating, digesting experience, also a role in repair and discovery, in so far as alpha dream-work is operating in the mix. When alpha dream-work is working well, it can contribute to furthering experience more quickly and effectively than simply conscious work. An emotional experience, then, is in some respects like a physical experience in that it can be felt to have a meaning; that is to say, it is felt to be an experience from which something can be learnt.
