This is a short book concerning Freud’s method for interpreting dreams. Freud states that dreams and their contents are not known to our consciousness. In that way dreams share qualities of phobias and obsessions. However, dreams can be analyzed for their deeper meanings. Freud feels that dreams are “a sort of substitute for the thought processes, full of meaning and emotion.” However, the contents of each dream is much shorter than the thoughts for which they are a substitute. The manner in which the latent content of a dream is transformed into its manifest content Freud has coined as the process of “dream work”. Because this process disguises the latent information in dreams it makes the nature of dreams outwardly unintelligible and confused.
The simplest dreams, children’s dreams, are often undisguised wish fulfillments. Sometimes this takes place in fulfilled reversals. When a disagreeable experience happens in real life, the dream will later represent the opposite scenario. Dreams also condense thoughts. Combinations of different persons are often combined into a single representative figure, designed to connect or compare the two separate individuals. “Just as connections lead from each element of the dream to several dream thoughts, so as a rule a single dream thought is represented by more than one dream element; the threads of association do not simply converge from the dream thoughts to the dream content, they cross and interweave with each other many times over the course of their journey.” The manifest dream content is invariably quite different from the latent thoughts. In fact, the dream content is always subservient to the role of the dream thought. “It is often an indistinct element which turns out to be the most direct derivative of the essential dream thought…. The more obscure and confused a dream appears to be, the greater share in its construction which may be attributed to the factor of displacement.” Freud believes that every dream, without exception, goes back to impressions of only a few days, most often the day immediately preceding the dream. Dreams are always of import and never concerned with trivialities, if we dig deep enough into their latent content. “It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or recognize the dream thoughts in the dream content, unless we understand the reason for their distortion." The dream thoughts are disguised as symbols by means of similes and metaphors, images representing poetic speech. “The manifest content of dreams consists for the most part in pictorial situations; and the dream thoughts must accordingly be submitted in the first place to a treatment which will make them suitable for a representation of this kind…. Absurdity in a dream signifies the presence in the dream thoughts of contradiction, ridicule, and derision…. No dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones.” Finally, all dreams that are produced in a single night will derive from the same circle of thoughts when they are analyzed deeply enough.
The “dream work” is never creative. It develops no fantasies of its own. It makes no judgements and draws no conclusions. It merely transforms through condensation and displacement, using pictorial forms. When one digs deep enough into latent thoughts one invariably finds thoughts that are both alien and disagreeable to the conscious mind. “There is a causal connection between the obscurity of the dream content and the state of repression.” Freud posits that in a state of sleep censorship of the mind is relaxed. Dreams are often quickly forgotten upon waking because “when the state of sleep is over, the censorship quickly recovers full strength; and it can now wipe out all that was won from it during the period of weakness…. [However, sometimes] a fragment of the dream content which had seemed to be forgotten reemerges. This fragment which has been rescued from oblivion invariably affords us the best and most direct access to the meaning of the dream.” Dreams exist to help us sleep. In fact, dreams are guardians of sleep. “The dream provides a kind of psychical consummation for the wish that has been suppressed (or formed with the help of repressed material) by representing it as fulfilled; but it also satisfies the other agency by allowing sleep to continue.”
Freud also contends that most dreams are about sex. “Analysis proves that a great many of the thoughts left over from the activity of waking life as “residues of the previous day” only find their way to representation in dreams through the assistance of repressed erotic wishes…. Infantile sexual wishes provide the most frequent and strongest motive forces for the construction of dreams…. The material of the sexual ideas must not be represented as such, but must be replaced in the content of the dream by hints, allusions, and similar forms of indirect representation.” For Freud, a banana is never just a banana. “There are some symbols which bear a single meaning almost universally: thus the Emperor and Empress (or the King and Queen) stand for the parents, rooms represent women and their entrances and exits the openings of the body. The majority of dream symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested in erotic interest.” Freud believes these symbols are not created by the “dream work”, but are taken from cultural artifacts such as myths, fairytales, and jokes. In the world of dreams, nothing is as it first seems.
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