Aeyde Traum Ch. 02

'Memories' by Jamieson Webster

A personal essay on childhood as the first landscape of dreams

In her latest essay for Aeyde Magazin, psychoanalyst and guest editor Jamieson Webster reflects on childhood as the first landscape of dreams. The text accompanies Aeyde's Spring/Summer '26 campaign, which draws on the imaginative intensity of childhood as a source of fantasy and desire.

After dreams and nightmares, we return to their earliest theater: childhood. If dreams metabolize what Freud called the day’s residue—little fragments of frustration from the day—a dream borrows intensity from something far older—early wishes, terrors, rivalries, pleasures. Childhood is not a chapter we leave behind. It presses on adult life from the inside, shaping what can be imagined, feared, or desired. To speak of dreams without speaking of childhood is to ignore the soil from which they grow.

Childhood is often marketed as innocence, but anyone who listens carefully to children knows that it is a laboratory of extremity. Love and hatred arrive without moderation. Possession flips quickly into rejection. The adored toy becomes the object hurled across the room. Winnicott described the child’s capacity to destroy in play as a crucial achievement.The tantrum is not a failure of civilization; it is one of its origins. 

In play, the child discovers that the world survives their aggression. Play is the child’s first dream-work. A cardboard box becomes a fortress, a spaceship, a coffin. A doll is mother, rival, twin, self. Through such transformations, children practice the alchemy that dreams will later perfect: condensation, displacement, reversal. 

Memory from these years rarely arrives as narrative. In psychoanalysis, we must gather the shards. It emerges as a texture—a patch of rough green carpet, the smell of soil after summer dew, the hum of a hallway light at night. Such fragments often surface in dreams long before they can be spoken. Childhood persists less as story than as rhythm.

Why does this matter now? Because the spaces that once sheltered play and reverie are increasingly colonized by stimulation. The child alone with boredom—a condition necessary for imagination—has become rare. Without boredom, there is no portal. We risk raising generations adept at consuming images but less practiced in generating them. To protect childhood, then, is not only to protect children. It is to preserve within culture a tolerance for the strangeness of childhood and its unfinished nature.

Shop the Spring/Summer '26 Collection here.