Dreams — the Royal Road to the Unconscious

People have long been inclined to find meaning in what they see in dreams. The ancients believed a dream could foretell the future. Most of us, at least once in our lives, have opened a dream dictionary to look up what a particular symbol was supposed to mean.

In 1900, one of Freud’s most important works appeared — “The Interpretation of Dreams,” later republished several times. Each time, the author added refinements and corrections, but the core theory of dreams stayed the same. Early in the book, Freud surveys the existing theories of dreams, the disagreements between various authors on the subject, and singles out the ideas he agrees with.

Sleep is a physiological process; the dream is a psychical phenomenon. In sleep we withdraw from the outside world and its “stimuli,” even though the dream’s content stays closely tied to waking life. “The dream thinks essentially in visual images, though not exclusively — it also works with auditory perceptions, and to a lesser extent with the perceptions of other senses.” Freud notes that dreams differ “in length, clarity, emotional coloring, and how well they’re retained in memory… there are very short dreams containing only one or a few images, a single thought, even a single word; other dreams are extraordinarily rich in content, playing out like whole novels… Some dreams are sharply defined…, while others are indescribably faint, blurred like shadows… Dreams can have a perfectly definite meaning, or at least be coherent, even witty, fantastically beautiful — or, conversely, confused, absurd, almost insane.” The feeling left behind on waking can vary just as widely. Some dreams are forgotten instantly; others we remember for years.

Analysts regard the dream as a manifestation of unconscious thought, and in sessions, a dream a client brings often becomes an object of analytic exploration. In the course of a session, the dream is broken down into its elements — “symbols of the dream’s unconscious thought” — for closer study. There’s no need to connect the pieces that come to mind into a tidy logical sequence; it works far better to associate freely, without worrying about making sense. Alongside the manifest (explicit) content, analysis pays close attention to the latent (hidden) content, which reveals far more about the client’s inner world. As Freud writes, “it is entirely possible, even quite likely, that the dreamer actually knows what their dream means — they simply don’t know that they know, and so insist they don’t.”