Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under
the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or
watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
John Lubbock
Introduction
Lying on one’s back on the grassy knoll of a park, beside a stream, or in a clearing in the woods, while gazing at the gentle, elegant dance of the clouds is one of the most pleasant experiences of childhood. It is an activity dreamy and unfocused; without agenda yet attuned. Wonder, enchantment, and anticipation mark the experience. Cloud gazing is an activity best shared with someone close, often a friend, where self-consciousness can be idle and ‘associations’ to the passing medley of shapes can flow without stricture. Watching clouds together is the metaphor which, for me, most closely captures the essence of analytic reverie. The subtle flow of conscious and preconscious thought, affect, and sensation associated with reverie is often cloud-like. It is ephemeral and ambiguous; appearing on the periphery of experience and often eluding our efforts to hold or shape those fleeting impressions.
I became acquainted with the term reverie while still an analytic candidate through one of my supervising analysts who had received her analytic training through the SAP.1 Initially, I didn’t have an understanding of the term as the term isn’t in common use by Jungian analysts, particularly those practicing within the classical model of analytical psychology or the school of archetypal psychology cultivated by James Hillman, even though the concept is quite compatible with Jungian theory and practice. Reverie enjoys wider recognition and use within the various schools of psychoanalytic thought.
On first hearing the term, it sounded rather exotic to me; like some kind of inner mystical communion or semi-hallucinatory dialogue. I imagined something similar to Jung’s discussions with Philemon,2 in which a deep inner wisdom would speak directly to me, guiding me in my interactions with the patient. Obviously, this had more to do with my idealization of the analytic process at the time as it did with the actual experience of reverie. Eventually, I learned it is often more pedestrian than I imagined, but no less significant to the process of analysis.
What is Reverie?
Reverie is opening to one’s own internal stream of consciousness – to ideas, thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, images, urges, and fantasies. According to Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time." In sympathy with Ortega y Gasset’s observation, reverie involves being receptive on many levels to the experience and communication, both explicit and implicit, of the other person’s presence in the room. It also includes a sensitivity to the emerging potentiality of the ‘analytic third’3 - the mutually constellated but indeterminate creation of the analytic dyad which comprises ‘something more’ than the combined individual contributions of the analytic partners. The potential range of reverie stretches from the ordinary to the transcendent. For example, Ogden describes reverie as, “an experience that takes the most mundane and yet most personal of shapes…They are our ruminations, daydreams, fantasies, bodily sensations, fleeting perceptions, images emerging from states of half-sleep, tunes, and phrases that run through our minds, and so on.”4 Working from a different vantage point, Marilyn Mathew articulates the connection between reverie and soul: “Reverie is both a process and a state of mind…it is reverie that extends psyche’s vision beyond the door and windows of our minds into the cathedrals of our souls.”5