ABSTRACT
This commentary depicts dream life and dreaming from Eigen’s view, along with examples from his actual dream experience. Dreams play a significant role in psychic growth and helping emotional life to feel real. Dreams are multiply determined, condensed, and part of their meaning often lies in their feeling quality. Dreaming is also a process and a forum for psychic and emotional digestion. When conscious emotional processing is inhibited or underdeveloped, attending to dream life with care and curiosity can help increase capacity for psychic digestion. The irrational id, seen mostly as destructive by Freud, can also be generative, depending on how we approach it. Dreams open us to the unknowable. Dream life helps process rhythms of injury and recovery, where dreams partly digest old feelings and events, and carry potential for new birth. The “author” of dreams seems to be both our own personality and an impersonal intelligence beyond the reach of our dreams, an unknown realm we contact during deep dreamless sleep.
