ABSTRACT
THE importance ascribed to the study of dreams is one of the most striking features of psycho-pathological research in recent years. Formerly regarded as a fortuitous product of uncontrolled cerebral activity, having no meaning or significance, the dream is now known to be a complex mental structure, fashioned by determinate forces, which half conceals and half reveals the most intimate secrets of the dreamer’s personality. These intimate secrets are not merely things that we have hidden from our fellows, but significant tendencies or desires which we have somehow succeeded in keeping hidden from ourselves. The dream is now held, by almost every school of psychopathology, to be a disguised or distorted revelation of what is taking place in the unconscious. By certain technical methods the disguise may be penetrated and the unconscious thoughts from which the dream has arisen may be unmasked. As we have seen, there is considerable difference of opinion concerning what goes on in the unconscious, and this difference has, in great part, arisen from differences in the ways in which dreams have been interpreted.
