A dream is a sausage mill you feed your life into.

(Benjamin Whitmer, Pike, p. 168)

Dreams are both extremely appealing and extremely troubling for the sociologist. Their appeal lies in their potential to throw light on an aspect of our experience which generally remains intriguing and yet ultimately unfathomable. For any researcher with a taste for adventure, the prospect of attempting to comprehend the incomprehensible represents an exhilarating scientific challenge.

Yet the curiosity and intellectual excitement provoked by such a phenomenon can quickly give way to anxiety.

Initially this is linked to several characteristics of the object in question. The dream is a mental phenomenon, occurring when subjects are asleep and, consequently, when they are incapable of speaking. It is a product of the imagination but something which the dreamers themselves experience as though they were plunged into the most vivid reality. It is not always remembered on waking and, even when that is the case, is often quickly modified or forgotten, consequently rendering the researcher’s task infinitely more difficult than that of getting subjects to talk about their waking activities. Finally, the dream appears strange, incoherent, delirious or incongruous in the eyes of the person who has produced it. The task is therefore theoretically and methodologically extremely challenging for researchers, and the study of dreams can rapidly turn into something of a nightmare.

And that is not all. Like the fairy-tale castle to which we seek to gain access, the dream-object is surrounded by thorns and guarded by a dragon. These thorns, this dragon, which render access to the dream so difficult, represent all the many past attempts to interpret dreams, and especially that associated with psychoanalysis. For a twenty-first-century researcher, it is difficult to dissociate dreams from the name of Sigmund Freud. The extent of Freud’s work, with its multiple shifts, whether acknowledged or unspoken, the abundance of commentaries it has inspired, and the schools or trends which have shared its heritage are all enough to dampen the desire for knowledge and to keep the inquisitive at bay.

The social sciences have been notably absent from the history of scholarly study of sleep and dreams. In contrast to the sustained involvement of all forms of psychology, from psychoanalysis to cognitive psychology, or more recently of the neurosciences, from neuropsychiatry to neurobiology, the contribution made by the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, remains extremely peripheral.

Some people will consider all this as only normal given that dreams are after all an activity which is both universal (everybody dreams), individual (everyone’s dreams are unique) and par excellence involuntary. That sociologists, anthropologists or historians can speculate on the way in which the dream has been viewed, approached, interpreted by different eras, societies or groups is hardly surprising. But for them to try to probe into the logic of dream creation, to see it as the result of a process which is linked to the situation of dreamers within the social world is, on the contrary, far from obvious.

It was during a period spent at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997 that, during the course of my reading, I by chance stumbled, to my great interest, on the beginnings of a sociology of dreams.¹ The research programme which followed, the first scientific formulation of which will be read in these pages, took shape over the course of twenty years of reading and research in parallel with other projects. This knowledge of research on the subject of dreams, both past and present, emerging from very different disciplines (psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, history, etc.) has enabled me to formulate a new integrative theory which, by taking as a starting point the knowledge gained from the synthetic model of interpretation imposed by Freud in his time, sets out to correct its weaknesses, its shortcomings and its errors by drawing on the many scientific developments which have emerged since the extraordinary feat of understanding represented by his book The Interpretation of Dreams, written on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²

If we consider the dream-object as a problem which needs to resolved, then we must be able to define all the terms of this problem and to express them in a coherent manner in order to reach a satisfactory solution, both from a theoretical point of view and from one which is compatible with the empirical facts. An involuntary psychic activity occurring during sleep, the dream can also be characterised as a specific form of expression through which the dreamer works on all the various problems preoccupying him or her, with varying degrees of consciousness, during waking life. I will attempt to demonstrate that such a form of symbolic expression can only really be understood by taking into account a number of elements relating to the incorporated past of the dreamer, to the recent circumstances of his or her life, and to the specific context of sleep in which the dream occurs and which is characterised notably by a withdrawal from the flow of ordinary social interactions and demands, by the slackening of the reflexive control of mental activity, and by the establishment of a self-to-self communication which is predominantly visual and largely implicit.

These different elements will be explained in detail and set out in a general formula for the interpretation of dreams that will allow us to think in a more dynamic way about the process of dream-making. The dream will be more generally thought of as a specific form of expression situated within an expressive continuum (dream, daydream, delirium, hallucination, play, literary creation or artistic expression, etc.) that varies depending on the conditions in which the psychic activity takes place. Practical analogy, which is, along with association through contiguity, one of the elementary forms of human psychic life and a feature of its historic nature, will be placed at the heart of oneiric operations (of symbolisation, condensation, metaphorisation, substitution, etc.) which make the expression of the dream so unique. And, finally, we will show how the dream can be scientifically interpreted provided it is associated with a non-dream state which forms its existential background.

This theory of oneiric expression which has been formulated from within sociology, but which also brings together a whole range of multidisciplinary work, allows the dream to make its entry into the social sciences from a perspective that is both dispositional and contextual. Succeeding in making the dream a focus of study for the social sciences is a way of expanding the field of study of these sciences by allowing access to what, even today, still remains very much a terra incognita.

Norbert Elias drew attention to the limits which, without always fully realising it, researchers in the social sciences have long imposed on themselves by studying ‘societies’ within national limits and by concentrating on adult individuals who are already socially constituted, as though they had never been children. But the list of unexplored domains and dimensions does not end there. For researchers have until now focused their attention almost exclusively on the most collectively organised behaviours of waking individuals, neglecting the fact that approximately one-third of their time is spent asleep and that these periods of sleep are accompanied by dreams.

What do these dreams tell us about the lives of individuals and about the societies in which they live? How are the social experiences of dreamers woven into the fabric of their imaginations, even during those times when the intentional consciousness no longer controls the flow of images? These are the crucial questions that emerge, questions which sociologists have hardly even attempted to answer. When the objects of their investigations fall asleep, sociologists close their eyes.

But a theory of oneiric expression is also, and even more importantly, an opportunity to contribute to the transformation of the social sciences by restoring to them legitimate ambitions which specialisation and a standardised form of professionalism have tended to undervalue. By focusing their attention on such a curious object, and by agreeing to step outside their comfort zones and to embrace multidisciplinary learning, researchers can begin to focus on crucial scientific questions: the fundamental psychic mechanisms peculiar to the historical and linguistic beings represented by socialised human beings; the internalisation of all kinds of social regularities in the form of incorporated dispositions or schema, ready to find expression at the slightest occasion, even during sleep; the relationship between past and present in human experience; the respective share of conscious and unconscious, of the voluntary and involuntary, of control and absence of control in psychic operations and in human behaviour; and, finally, the freedom and determinism which, today more than ever before, stimulate debate on the ‘reasons’ for our acts or our thoughts. If the dream is indeed to make its entry into the great house of social sciences, it does so not with the intention of leaving the place unchanged but in order to shake up old habits and to reconfigure the space.

In contrast to what Freud believed (for reasons which will be closely examined), the dream will appear finally as the symbolic arena freed most completely from all the different forms of censorship, whether formal or moral, that lie mercilessly in wait for dreamers the moment they awake. The self-to-self communication in which the dream is expressed, overturning linguistic and narrative conventions, liberating dreamers from any kind of restraint, in a sense represents the most intimate of private diaries, the most unequivocal expression of all forms of freedom of speech. Consequently, for those who are interested in them, dreams thus offer the elements necessary for a deep and subtle understanding of what we are. Studying them essentially enables us to discover our deep-seated and hidden preoccupations and to understand what thought processes operate within us beyond the reach of our volition.

In all scientific research, a balance needs to be found between, on the one hand, the formulation of a general theoretical model along with the methods associated with it and, on the other hand, the identification of the socio-historical structures, processes, mechanisms or logics peculiar to specific individuals or groups of individuals within a social reality. In order to achieve such a balance, the results of the research will need to be published in the form of two separate volumes.

Because of its previously unexplored nature, the sociological interpretation of dreams, as a form of expression and as a unique process, initially called for the construction of an integrative and empirically pertinent theory – i.e. one which took into account all the theoretical-empirical knowledge already existent – that would enable the dream (the logics behind its production and not merely its uses and interpretations) to enter the realm of the social sciences. In this phase of the study, the sole purpose of any examples of dreams or of extracts of dreams included is to prove the relevance and the rich potential of the theoretical model or of the methodological tools associated with it. This implies not that such examples are mere illustrations but, rather, that their purpose is to demonstrate the capacity of the model to take on any example whatsoever and to emphasise the way that it is indeed implemented on the basis of predetermined methods. Such is the purpose of this first volume.

A systematic study of the precise corpus of dreams, such as I began to undertake in order to elaborate and support my theoretical and methodological thinking, implies, on the other hand, that the established theoretical model, even though still subject to improvements and transformations, be applied to the understanding of a clearly determined empirical material. It is then the reality being studied and its specificities which predominate. Both the theoretical model and the methodological tools take a back seat in order to turn the spotlight onto this reality which they have made it possible to understand. This will be the purpose of the second volume.

It is important, from my point of view, not to see this division into two volumes as representing any opposition between theory and empirical knowledge, given that theory and empiricism will be present in both volumes. It is simply that they do not occupy the same space within the framework of the scientific task undertaken. If a more specific description of the two phases of research is needed, it would be better to refer to an experimental phase, that of putting together an empirically based theoretical-methodological creation (by taking into account any empirical knowledge already accrued in the construction of a synthetic theoretical model), and a phase of systematic exploration, theoretically and methodologically orientated, on determined empirical corpora.