ABSTRACT
Dreams have meaning, at both surface (manifest) and deeper (latent) semantic levels. Context is the key to latent content, which can be defined as the interaction of manifest content with context. Quantitative content-analysis confirms the continuity between awake and dream cognition. N (the number of observations) is often crucial for interpretation since meanings in dreams and fantasy often become apparent only with large enough n’s. Some primitive symbols (which physically or functionally resemble their referents) are universal by dint of the universality of their referents. Also, there may be biologically preparation for certain ways of representing ideas in dreams and fantasy. Surprisingly, Freudian distortions and Bartlettian distortions turn out to be identical, but for motive (defense vs. schematization). Freud’s “dream- work” is a subset of distortions regularly found in awake cognition. As Freud proposed, dreams are “hypermnesic” in that they may reveal information inaccessible to awake consciousness. Dreams constitute but one dialect from a family of release phenomena (e.g., jokes, paraphasias, parapraxes, fairy tales). One dialect may serve as a clarifying model of another. Elements of memory are organized associatively, yielding “spheres of meaning.” The essential fact about dreams is that they are confusing but honest, and for the same reason: disinhibition.
