And, to return for a moment specifically to dreams, we should note that there are cultures other than our own in which dreams are understood very much as ours understands poems -- as harbringers of growing wisdom or sound reasons to change one's life -- and in which they -- dreams -- don't stand in need of the explications we require. ...

And indeed, if a roughly Freudian model of dream interpretation is correct, then it seems we should at least entertain the possibility of the dream not merely as interpretand but as interpretiens. -- The dream as, in some cases, a re-structuring or translation of its own: as a raid on the articulate -- language, logic, kidnapped by connectedness, a dense protean vision of the world. Proof that you've understood such expressions is not that you can translate them, or translate them back, into secondary process, but that you are left breathless with the shock of meaning -- with the recognition of 'having been gone up to,' as Wittgenstein would put it, with the sense of "several things dovetailed in [the] mind," as Keats would say.

- Jan Zwicky, from "Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation."

---

---

---