anchorage in everyday 'narrative' security. Bion would speak of "an intense catastrophic emotional explosion O," which could only be known through its aftereffects. Where before he had privileged the domain of knowledge (K), now he would speak as well of "resistance to the shift from transformations involving K (knowledge) to transformations involving O ... resistance to the unknowable". Hence his injunctions to the analyst to eschew memory and desire, to "bring to bear a diminution of the 'light' – a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight. If any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly". In stating this he was making connections to Freud, who in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome had referred to a mental counterpart of scotopic, "mole like vision", used to gain impressions of the Unconscious. He was also making links with the apophatic method used by contemplative thinkers such as St John of the Cross, a writer quoted many times by Bion. Bion was well aware that our perception and our attention often blind us to what genuinely and strikingly is new in every moment. Reverie Bion's concept of maternal "reverie" as the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant has been an important element in post-Kleinian thought: "Reverie is an act of faith in unconscious process ... essential to alpha-function'" It is considered the equivalent of Stern's attunement, or Winnicott's maternal preoccupation. In therapy, the analyst's use of "reverie" is an important tool in his/her response to the patient's material: "It is this capacity for playing with a patient's images that Bion encouraged". Late Bion "For the later Bion, the psychoanalytic encounter was itself a site of turbulence, 'a mental space for further ideas which may yet be developed'." In his unorthodox quest to maintain such "mental space", Bion "spent the final years of his long and distinguished professional life [writing] a futuristic trilogy in which he is answerable to no one but himself, A Memoir of the Future." If we accept that "Bion introduced a new form of pedagogy in his writings...[via] the density and non-linearity of his prose", it comes perhaps to a peak here in what he himself termed "a fictitious account of psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream ... science fiction". We may conclude at least that he achieved his stated goal therein: "To prevent someone who