The imaginary self

The imaginary self is the dreamer as represented within the dream: an irreal figure that the sleeper experiences as themselves, rather than as a real waking consciousness transported into an imagined scene. This distinction explains how a dream can become personally compelling without losing its imaginary character. The dreamer enters the dream by identifying with one of its objects; once that object is experienced as the self, the dream’s world is no longer merely a spectacle but a world in which the dreamer is represented, endangered, and made to suffer.

Definition and Conditions

A dream cannot contain the sleeper as a real person in the ordinary waking sense. For that would require awareness of existing in the real world, in real time, with real memories—the conditions of waking life. Introduce a real person into the imaginary drama, and, in the account developed here, the dream falls apart as reality reappears. The dreaming consciousness is instead nonthetically conscious of itself as fascinated by the dream; it has lost its being-in-the-world and recovers it upon waking.

The dreamer’s presence in the scene therefore depends on an imaginary counterpart. An impersonal dream may become personal when the sleeper comes to believe that an existing figure—for example, a slave fleeing a tiger—is themselves. Or the dream may be personal from the start: its imagery produces an unspecified object with which the sleeper identifies. In either case, the object supplies the material substrate for the dreamer’s sense of being in the irreal world. The sleeper is not literally present there as a waking self; the sleeper is taken by the belief that an object already belonging to that world is them.

Becoming the Dream’s Figure

When the sleeper identifies with a figure, that figure does not cease to be irreal. Rather, the represented person acquires a distinctive quality of being-me: the figure is the dreamer, but only as an imaginary self. The essay adapts Claparède’s term Meness to describe this quality. The transformation is not the discovery of a hidden real person inside the dream; it is a change in how the dream figure is constituted and experienced.

The comparison with reading clarifies the difference between partial identification and dream identification. A reader may sympathize with a novel’s hero and identify with them to some degree while retaining aesthetic distance and the possibility of reflection. The reader remains, in that sense, both themselves and someone else. In the personal dream, by contrast, the dangers threatening the figure become dangers belonging to the dreamer’s imaginary self. The feeling shifts from sympathy to belonging: the dreamer is represented as threatened, pursued, or at risk of an irreal death that would end both the figure and the world around it.

A World Lived from Within

Once the imaginary self is inside the dream, the dream world closes around it. The figure does not merely represent the dreamer; it irreally lives, acts, and suffers. The dreamer still sees the figure from outside, yet also feels themselves to be that figure. The relation is described as one of emanation: the dreamer’s sense of self is grasped in the figure, outside the intimacy of waking self-consciousness. In parallel, the dream world remains represented, but becomes a world immediately lived—as feared, hated, or suffered by the imaginary self.

This altered relation changes the dream’s organization as well as its emotional force. The dreamer cannot simply step out of the enchantment by choosing a different possibility. The imaginary adventure can cease only through the production of another imaginary adventure, so the dreamer must undergo its fascination to the end. The dream is thus a closed illustration of a consciousness for which the category of the real is absent from the experience at hand, even though the dream’s objects remain irreal.

The dream can also sustain two viewpoints at once. The sleeper represents the world from a superior, world-creating point of view, while the imaginary self occupies a limited position within it. The sleeper does not literally take the figure’s place in order to see; instead, the dream’s events are oriented around the object-self that lives and suffers them. A threatening dog, for instance, approaches that imagined self rather than the sleeper’s waking body. The dream’s space is consequently organized by vectors of tension and lines of force around the figure, not simply by the shared space of perception.

Contrast with Hallucination

The account of the imaginary self also belongs to a broader distinction between imagining and perceiving. An imaged object is given as irreal and has its own space; an object of perception makes a claim to reality. The irreality of the imagined object corresponds to consciousness’s nonthetic awareness of its spontaneity as creative activity. This structure, the essay argues, does not depend on whether the subject is mentally healthy or ill. The central problem of hallucination is therefore not merely where a hallucinated object seems to be, but how a patient can believe in the reality of an image constituted as irreal.

Hallucination provides a contrast rather than another instance of the dream self. In the discussion of hallucination, sudden auditory or visual imaging consciousnesses are described as spontaneous, while the patient’s overall attitude may be transformed: the patient knows they speak with their own mouth but experiences the speaking as if it were done by someone else. The essay relates genuine hallucinations to a vacillation of personal consciousness, with scattered thoughts and diminished perception accompanying a partial, disorganized psychic system that cannot become an object of focused observation. The dream’s imaginary self, by contrast, gives the dreamer a figure through which to inhabit the dream world. This distinction preserves the difference between a dream that makes the self irreal within its own scene and a hallucination associated with disruption of personal synthesis.