The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams Read Free Page A

conducting his own self-analysis. Examining his dreams led Freud to deduce that his dreams revealed he was actually happy about the death of his father, biographers say, which motivated him to explore dreams as expressions of emotions typically held back in waking life. Freud published the results of his work with the dreams of psychiatric patients in twenty-six different volumes, including The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which he liked to call his "dream book." Although it initially aroused little interest, selling only 351 copies in the first six years, Freud himself considered it to be his "most significant work"; in the preface to its third edition in 1931, he called it "the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime.''
This landmark book chronicles his use of free associationsaying whatever comes to mindas a technique for understanding how the content of dreams is connected with a patient's waking life; Freud's technique of noting all of the dreamer's associations with a dream or dream symbol is still popular in dream interpretation today. Freud believed dreams came from the unconscious, that part of the brain that represses (holds back) or forgets memories, though even these supposedly lost emotions can usually be recalled. (Some people refer to it as the subconscious, though unconscious is the preferred term.) In trying to imagine the unconscious, it may help to think of your brain as an office building: The front room is your waking experience; the back room is your memory, easily accessible, logically filed; and the storage area beyond the back room is your unconscious, hard to get to sometimes, and elaborately cross-referenced with everything you have experienced in some surprising ways.
What is the purpose of dreams? As Freud saw it, dreams

 

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express buried sexual and aggressive impulses or wishes that are not safe or appropriate to reveal in everyday life; the unconscious takes over during sleep, he theorized, and it is from there that dreams emerge, providing a kind of mental release valve for these strong feelings.
Freud described two different levels of dream elements: the manifest dream content, the dream's basic story line as the dreamer recalls it; and the latent dream content, the unconscious wishes the dreamer has suppressed. Freud believed the latent dream content is where the true meaning lies. If you are wondering why the meaning of dreams is sometimes so hard to figure out, Freud would say it's because your conscious mind cannot deal with the latent dream content up front, so your unconscious steps in to shield or conceal the meaning from you by disguising the sexual or aggressive longings.
Freud suggested that the mind masks these often "inappropriate" desires by substituting a symbol for the unexpressed wish. In this way, the latent dream content is depicted through the symbolic manifest dream content. Freud was preoccupied with sexual content in dreams because he believed that dreaming is largely about the sexual urges repressed in early childhood; it is for this reason that any elongated object is considered a phallic or penislike symbol, and any cavity or container-type object a symbol of the vagina in Freudian interpretation. Dream activity such as flying or floating also bears some relation to a repressed sexual wish, according to Freud.
So, when people say "Oh, that's so Freudian," they are generally referring to an action or statement that appears to have an unconscious motivationusually sexual or aggressive. A Freudian interpretation of a dream, then, would be scrutinized for these impulses: If you dream you cannot move, Freudian theory would suggest, you are holding back sexual feelings; if

 

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you dream you are falling, you are contemplating giving in to a sexual urge, and so forth. Freud considered these kinds of symbols and themes to be so typical and pervasive as to be