ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the path that psychoanalysis has taken across the twentieth century, moving from the interpretation of the patient's dream in analysis to the much broader activity of dreaming both in the sleeping and in the waking state. In most extra-psychoanalytic cultures, dreams are seen as a bridge to the future, as the expression of the opportunity to catch a glimpse of what may happen. Sigmund Freud's manifest aspiration with regard to dreams is quite evident in his work and extremely positivistic. His intention is to demonstrate scientifically that dreams have a meaning, albeit a latent meaning, that must be painstakingly and expertly identified. A development in the mode of understanding dreams as a function of human thought, from which follows a new use of the dream in the session, is the fruit of the work of Wilfred Ruprecht Bion.
