Psychoanalysis sees in dreams a sort of privileged path to the unconscious mind. But we need to leave the beaten paths of scientific and psychoanalytic discourse in order to access a renewed ability to listen to dreams and receive the trials they unexpectedly grant. Animals dream. Dream activity was inscribed in the animal kingdom, well before the emergence of humanity, simultaneously with playfulness and homeothermia. This continuity between animals and man asserts itself equally in the great myths and in modern genetics. The unconscious mind that Pierre Lembeye refers to thus intervenes before the individual, the human, or language. Dreaming is identified insofar as it is manifest, and embraced in its transcendence and its future. What founds and governs is neither free will, nor dreams, but the moment of contact, of trial, between semi-wakefulness and sleep, that engages the whole being, before the separation of complete wakefulness installs sight and sound’s precedence over the whole sensorial range.

Pierre Lembeye challenges certain certitudes that prevent us from rethinking dreams. Examining psychoanalysis’s well-known interpretations of dreams in the light of his own experimental work, (interviews with patients shortly after 9/11, as well as Palestinian children’s dreams, Germans’ dreams during the war and Primo Levi’s dreams in a concentration camp…), he thinks of dreams as trials bestowed upon the dreamer in order to live.