Yes—absolutely. In fact, this idea is central to many streams of psychoanalytic, existential, and poetic thought:
Dreaming is a form of thinking—just not conscious, linear, or logical thinking. It is the mind thinking itself through images, moods, symbols, and non-verbal transformations.
Let’s explore this more deeply and in different registers:
1. Freud: Dreams as Wish-Fulfillment and Unconscious Thought
Freud famously called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious”, and in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he presents dreams as:
• Disguised wish-fulfillments
• Compromises between repressed desires and censorship
• A form of “secondary revision”, where the unconscious tries to think, remember, and represent in symbolic form
For Freud, dreams are unconscious thoughts translated into symbolic language—a kind of thinking in disguise.
2. Bion: Dreaming as the Mind’s Way of Thinking Emotional Experience
Wilfred Bion took this further. For him:
• Dreaming is the psyche’s way of metabolizing raw emotional experience.
• The mind dreams even when we’re awake—it’s an ongoing process of “thinking” experience into meaning.
• When this dreaming function is damaged or overwhelmed, we experience unprocessed fragments (he called them “beta elements”) that cannot be thought.
So for Bion, dreaming = unconscious thinking = emotional digestion.
3. Ogden: Dreaming the Analytic Session
Thomas Ogden builds on Bion and says that:
• The psychoanalytic process involves “dreaming the patient’s experience” together.
• Dreaming is a kind of shared, unconscious thinking, where analyst and patient co-create new ways of symbolizing what could not previously be borne.
He even says:
“The unconscious is that which dreams us.”
This beautifully reverses the usual logic—we are not simply the ones who dream, but we are dreamed by the unconscious, by life, by memory.
4. Philosophical Echoes:
Jung: Dreams are not only personal but archetypal—they are the psyche’s way of thinking with myth.
Nietzsche: The unconscious is more intelligent than we know—art, dreams, and instincts are its deepest expressions.
Deleuze: Dreams are becomings, not representations—they’re part of a rhizomatic, productive unconscious.
Basho / Zen: The dream is not “unreal”—it is one form of the reverberation of the world within us.
5. So Yes: Dreaming Is Thinking, But…
|
Mode of Thinking |
Characteristics |
|
Conscious thinking |
Linear, verbal, goal-directed, logical |
|
Unconscious thinking (dreaming) |
Symbolic, imagistic, affective, nonlinear, paradoxical |
|
Dreaming |
The mind’s poetic, emotional, and somatic way of thinking what it cannot say directly |
Dreams are not noise—they are compressed poems, compressed theories, compressed cries.
Final Thought:
Dreaming is thinking that refuses to speak in prose.
It is the night-mind, stitching symbols to silence.
It is a thinking that lives beneath the grammar of self—and sometimes, is more truthful than anything we say aloud.
Would you like to explore how this connects to writing, healing, or non-dual states of awareness?
