Words: Jamieson Webster
Date: 26.01.2026

As a psychoanalyst, I’ve long been drawn to the dream world in all its forms—the fleeting scenes that evaporate on waking, the nightmares that cling, the dreams that return us to childhood, and those that feel uncannily ahead of us, like premonitions of the future. Dream-life speaks its own language, revealing something essential about our psychic life and the unconscious ties that link us to others.

Does everyone dream? The short answer is yes. Everyone who sleeps, dreams—even if you don’t remember them. Brain monitoring would show a pattern of activity in the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) part of our sleep cycle associated with dreaming. Our immune system is activated at night and seems to work with these cycles of sleep. All of it protecting us—our mind and our bodies. But what do dreams mean? Who are they for? That is the more interesting and enigmatic question!

In German, the word Traum—dream—carries within it an echo of trauma: a wound, an opening. Dream is also linked to space in Hebrew, חלל (halal), which can be translated as cavity. Through etymology, dreams appear as a wound-space: a place where unconscious life gathers around one of psychoanalysis’s most basic problems—the difficulty of going there.

We do go there, but only while we are not there. Namely, while we are asleep. Is this why dreams are so vulnerable to being forgotten, why we work so hard to catch hold of them in the softness of waking? Every morning, it can feel as though we battle a censor standing guard at the gates, eager to banish our dreams back to the underworld.

I love the idea of something so mystical appearing in the space between our days. A dream is not merely a series of images or stories the mind tells itself at night, nor is it reducible to nonsensical brain activity or the recycling of the day’s residue. A dream is a rupture: an interruption of ordinary consciousness that breaks the humdrum round of thoughts and worries and may leave a mark on us. Dreams follow their more colloquial meaning, circling our deepest wishes, wounds, fears, and hopes. There is something bracing in the nightly chance of touching what matters most—an important reminder in a world that increasingly feels on the brink.

Dreams were once understood as messages. In religion and myth, these messages were divine—visions, prophecies, communications from the gods. With Freud, at the turn of the twentieth century, dreams were secularized. What was once divine became unconscious: part of a vast, unknown, yet intimate storehouse that also touches something collective, shared by all humans. And yet Freud’s science remains a strange one—perhaps even a dreamy one. He was fascinated by the fact that the more one works with dreams, the more alive and pliable they become.

Dreams speak to one another. They borrow images, repeat themselves, revise, and sometimes seem to interpret themselves, especially when something urgent insists on being heard. Dreams act as a storehouse for culture, revealing what we have inherited from our milieus without knowing it. Can something so autonomous, shared, and suggestible truly be scientific? Freud’s answer was yes: dreams could be studied, their logic traced, their meanings decoded. Each of us, he believed, could learn our own idiom—our private vernacular for dreaming.

Dreams have continually preoccupied popular culture, especially film, which often feels made of the stuff of dreams—from Frenchy’s fantasy of reinvention in Grease, to Hitchcock’s Spellbound, where a dream unlocks a mystery; from Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, whose protagonist dreams her erotic life beyond bourgeois constraint, to The Sopranos, where Tony Soprano confronts his anxieties in a world of declining authority. Dreams act like a play within the play, exposing inner lives before characters themselves can recognize them, staging encounters with what earlier cultures called destiny. Across genres and eras, dreams remain a space where desire, fear, and imagination coexist without resolution. They ask us what our lives have meant—and quietly suggest that, somewhere, we already know.

Why return to this ancient technology now? When contemporary technologies monetize attention, when artificial intelligence hallucinates in our place, and when images are increasingly tailored to data rather than to unconscious memory and feeling, what becomes of our dream space? What happens when nearly every moment of the day offers a way to hide from ourselves and our deepest wounds? To ask about dreams in the twenty-first century is to ask what remains irreducibly human—and irreducibly unconscious—within our current landscape. I would venture that protecting dreams is among our most precious and urgent tasks.

The Pre-Spring ‘26 Collection launches on 29.01.2026