Dreaming as Reflexivity: An Interpretation of Bernard Lahire's Sociology of Dreams

Drawing on Bernard Lahire's sociological approach to dreams and revisiting its critical dialogue with Bourdieu, this article presents dreaming as an involuntary modality of reflexivity: an internal communication in which the subject reflects on existential concerns experienced in waking life. Like other forms of reflexivity—from artistic self-expression to reflections articulated on the psychoanalytic couch—dreaming constitutes a “deferred elaboration” of significant issues triggered in prior experience but insufficiently elaborated due to the intrusion of the “urgencies of practice” in everyday social life. The conceptualization of dreaming as reflexivity builds on pragmatist notions of “imaginative rehearsal” and “internal conversation,” as well as on phenomenology's contrast between dreaming and the “paramount reality” of ordinary life. Conceived as part of a research program on modes of reflexivity, the sociology of dreams emerges not only as an application of, but also as a central contributor to sociological accounts of human subjectivity.