ABSTRACT
In 1900, at the beginning of the new century, Sigmund Freud auspiciously published The Interpretation of Dreams. This chapter describes the nature of dreaming and Freud’s method of interpreting dreams. He proposed that dreams originated from the unconscious of the dreamer and had personal meaning that could be understood through the method of free association. Freud proposed that dreams are disguised; that there is a manifest content—the dream as told by the dreamer with its frequently bizarre narrative and imagery—and a latent, hidden content, which only becomes clear following analysis of the dream. Freud goes on to discuss the Oedipus complex, where the child unconsciously wishes one parent dead so that they can have the other parent exclusively for themselves. The condensation is relatively succinct; Freud points out that on some occasions, a dream that may be written out in half a page might generate associations which “may occupy six, eight, or a dozen times as much space”.
