ABSTRACT
Dreams, as Freud famously formulated, are the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious. The great value of dreams is that they are uncontaminated by the normal processes of shaping and manipulation by which conscious thoughts and utterances are tailored so as not to disrupt ourselves and those around us. Like other metaphoric communications, including poetry, dreams are ‘polysemic’ – that is they have many meanings, can be responded to at many different levels, and can be interpreted in many different ways. Some dreams certainly can represent wishes, very often of a sexual or ambitious kind, just as do daydreams. Psychotherapists in training may feel alarmed if their patient produces a dream, since they think that the patient will expect them to give an exact, complete interpretation of it. The psychotherapist will frequently have as patients middle-aged people suffering from depression.
