VI — The Dream-Work

All previous attempts to solve the problems of the dream have been based directly upon the manifest dream content as it is retained in the memory, and have undertaken to obtain an interpretation of the dream from this content, or, if interpretation was dispensed with, to base a judgment of the dream upon the evidence furnished by this content. We alone are in possession of new data; for us a new psychic material intervenes between the dream content and the results of our investigations: and this is the latent dream content or the dream thoughts which are obtained by our method. We develop a solution of the dream from this latter, and not from the manifest dream content. We are also confronted for the first time with a problem which has not before existed, that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dream thoughts and the manifest dream content, and the processes through which the former have grown into the latter.

We regard the dream thoughts and the dream content as two representations of the same meaning in two different languages; or to express it better, the dream content appears to us as a translation of the dream thoughts into another form of expression, whose signs and laws of composition we are to learn by comparing the original with the translation. The dream thoughts are at once intelligible to us as soon as we have ascertained them. The dream content is, as it were, presented in a picture-writing, whose signs are to be translated one by one into the language of the dream thoughts. It would of course be incorrect to try to read these signs according to their values as pictures instead of according to their significance as signs. For instance, I have before me a picture-puzzle (rebus): a house, upon whose roof there is a boat; then a running figure whose head has been apostrophised away, and the like. I might now be tempted as a critic to consider this composition and its elements nonsensical. A boat does not belong on the roof of a house and a person without a head cannot run; the person, too, is larger than the house, and if the whole thing is to represent a landscape, the single letters of the alphabet do not fit into it, for of course they do not occur in pure nature.