Reverie gets a bad rap, if it gets a rap at all. So often confused with dreams, and set aside in the shadows of the great dramas of life, reverie has little to show for itself in the annals of psychology. Bachelard took it upon himself to redeem reverie.

As soon as I started to read The Poetics of Reverie, I knew exactly what Bachelard was talking about. If you place yourself as a child, lying on a hill on a clear day, staring at the sky, then you have some sense of reverie.

If you understand life as an interplay of forces that expand against forces that contract, then you know that reverie expands, while reality contracts. Without Bachelard, reality wins. This is the Freudian idea. With Bachelard, reverie returns to regain its essential position of balancing reality. He calls it the irreality function.

As Bachelard was fond of saying, there is no future without imagination. Fortunately, most of us won’t accept a reality without a future. Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Road is the most eloquent testimony to this fact to come along in years. Read it and you will clearly understand the narrow difference between hopeless and hopeful.

Imagination situates itself in childhood for the simple reason that it is most redeemable there. Childhood is our eternal metaphor for innocent perception, for uncomplicated life, for happiness and a hopeful future. Childhood is the go-to place for our dreams. How often you hear it said: “When I was a child I wanted to be a ….”

Psychological dysfunction, neurosis, psychic trauma, addiction, suffering – none of these offers a future to build on. As Bachelard puts it, “It is striking that the most favorable field for receiving the consciousness of freedom is none other than reverie. To grasp this liberty when it intervenes in a child’s reverie is paradoxical only if one forgets that we still dream of liberty as we dreamed of it when we were children. What other psychological freedom do we have than the freedom to dream? Psychologically speaking, it is in reverie that we are free beings.” (Poetics of Reverie)

This then is the task: if we wish to grow then we must redeem the dreams of childhood.