ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the functionings of the dreamwork. It describes that the principal reason for seeing the Singe as such is precisely that, following the opening announcement that the poems report dream contents, Du Bellay's unexpected associations the source of obscurity derive from this clearly stated status. In the present, one cannot discuss dream work and dream interpretation without in some fashion encountering the monumentality of Sigmund Freud's contribution to the subject. Franois Berriot provides a brief account of books on dream decipherment and their functions in sixteenth-century France. The Oneirocritica is a strikingly modern book in that it concerns itself with not only the meaning of dreams, but also the rhetorical mechanisms by which dream content may be brought to yield meaning. For Freud and Du Bellay, both drawing on Artemidorus, dream images become signs in a system of signification that an understanding of a certain set of allegorical relations will make available to interpretation.
