ABSTRACT
One of the aesthetic accomplishments of dream work is the dream setting, the establishment of an environment composed of imagery that leads the dreamer into the dream experience. According to Sigmund Freud, the motivating urge of a dream is an infantile repressed wish. Without the presence of a repressed wish, other dream thoughts – for example memories of past events and thoughts from the day's experience – will not be constructed into a dream. Experiences in life not only evoke repressed instinctual wishes, they also elicit ego memories: indeed, for each dream that represents an instinctual wish there is also an implicit ego attitude, a memorial record of the ego's handling of the wish. The modes of handling the varied instinctual and memorial themes of the dream seem be aesthetic accomplishments of the ego, which functions to transform the theme into a dramatic representation where the dreamer will experience the theme.
