El sueño de la metafísica

Common experience presents dreams as a succession of images. Even those who have tried to theorize them have linked the dreamlike with a kind of vision, as if dreaming was always seeing something. In contrast with this received view of dreams, this article argues that, since dreams are inhabited by negatities that appear through the absence, lack, frustration or, more generally, through desire itself, the paradoxical ontology of these perceptions forces us to switch from the visual paradigm of representation to the discursive model of meaning. It is concluded that, far from being an image, dreams are always already a text.