Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams'

"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."  D. H. Lawrence

"Within each one of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from how we see ourselves."  Carl Jung

It is commonplace to see someone asleep on the tube. But few people wake up their fellow travellers to check they haven't missed their stop. This might be a good thing, for dreaming is a good way to order your mind, cluttered from a hard day's work. Indeed, it is recommended to sleep directly after revising something you need to know off by heart, as you are more likely to remember it. We all know the phrase, "Sleep on it, it'll all become clearer in the morning."

Historically dreams have been viewed in a number of ways. To the Ancient Greeks, dreams were often said to be prophetic or warnings of what was to come. The Romantics viewed dreams as a symbolic ‘analysis’ of the world, for example the German poet Novalis believed dreams produced images of sensual reflection. Some people believe dreams are influenced by what you eat before you go to bed. Like Freud, Aristotle believed dreams could be interpreted psychologically.

Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) is his most successful work and in it we find many of the key concepts we link to Freud such as the role of the unconscious and the Oedipus complex.

That the dream is basically a wish-fulfilment is the fundamental basis of his theory. The obvious examples quoted are those of children’s dreams, where they dream of an unfulfilled daytime wish being fulfilled in their dreams. For example, Freud’s daughter tells her father, the day after spending what she felt was too short a trip on the Aussee lake, at the age of three, that she dreamt last night of sailing on the sea.

The key to understanding dreams, according to Freud, is in understanding that they are almost all wish fulfilments, the wishes of which are frequently repressed wishes, buried in the subconscious. Moreover the wishes expressed in dreams are often disguised, so that it is not at all evident what they are. This is because according to Freud, we censor our thoughts so that they do not disturb us. Thus, dreams are an unstable compromise between desire and prohibition; in dreams we can fulfil wishes which would be unacceptable in waking life.

Freud claims that far from being illogical and meaningless dreams are actually significant events and that the unintelligible features of dreams, logical impossibilities and bizarre happenings result from an unstable compromise between desire and prohibition within us. Thus, at face value dreams can be highly misleading, but on closer study reveal more about our unconscious mind. Freud concedes that there are some unintelligible aspects in dreams, caused by the dreaming mind's tendency to overgeneralise and its indifference to self contradiction.

Freud goes further in attributing a real purpose to dreams: that of the guardian of sleep: the function of dreaming is to stop the speaker waking. Thus, we often ignore outside noises or incorporate them into our dreams so that we can continue sleeping. He quotes the most common dreams of this type: any variation of the dream where you dream of going to the toilet or not being able to go to the toilet, which is dreamt in order to stop us waking when we need the toilet, and dreams where we dream of getting up and getting ready so we gain a few extra minutes of sleep comfortable in the fake knowledge that we are doing what we need to. One of Freud’s patients was told whilst he was in bed that he needed to go to the hospital, whereupon he promptly dreamed he was there, thinking if I am already there I do not need to get up and go.

Freud speaks of the great difference between the latent content and manifest content of dreams. The latent content comprises one or more incidents or thoughts from the 'dream day', the twelve hours before the dream and significant events having occurred in both the recent and more distant past, possibly including those from distant childhood. Freud states that these events may or may not already be distorted in the memory.

The manifest content is described as a compression and condensation of the latent dream thoughts. Freud notes that displacement of the latent content often occurs in the manifest content, which can consist of displacement of anything including people, time and place. He asserts that this displacement is often the result of repression or censorship of certain unconscious thoughts in the dreamwork.


Writers and other artists have tried to convincingly represent the dream throughout time, some like Hesse and Kafka create whole dream landscapes for their characters. Freud thought his theories about dreams could and should be applied to literature, which as he quotes from Schiller in his work, is a 'creative madness' and hence stems, at least in part, from the unconscious. Indeed, he ascribes the Oedipus complex to Shakespeare claiming the real reason Hamlet could not kill his uncle was that his uncle had done what he himself desired to do, killed his father and married his mother.

Freud is famous for positing the idea of dream censorship, particularly censorship of sexual thoughts. However, one must consider that his evidence was based on a number of very similar clients: bourgeois men and women, who had been brought up in the sexually repressed environment of the late 19th and early 20th century. One patient of Freud’s, finding masturbation unacceptable, tried to 'cure' himself of it by sleeping with women. This seems ludicrous nowadays. At least in the Western world, people are much more open about sexuality. Whilst much of what Freud wrote was ground breaking and incredibly thought provoking, the real flaw with Freud's theories lay in his narrow client  base, the study of which perhaps inevitably led to his fixation on sex.