> The implication of these premises is embedded in the fact Freud repeatedly distinguishes, in some manner between what seems and what is, i.e., between what is manifest or observed and what is latent or true, between what is conscious and un conscious, and so on. Further, the metaphorical, symbolic, distorted, surreal character of dreams argues that the dream world belongs to a different category of reality than the waking world. For example, with regard to latent and manifest dream content, Freud differentiates, then compares and con trasts, these concepts, with a view toward interpreting the latent content of apparently straightforward but plainly sur real (or anyway not-real) manifest dream content (Freud 45). As the term implies, manifest content means more or less what hap pens in a dream. Manifest content may be painful or traumatic, but for Freud, it does not follow that the painful dream "means" straightforwardly what it says. If that were the case, the process of dream distortion (images or events in a dream that conceal or stand for hidden meanings that can be interp reted) would be meaningless, and that concept is essential to Freud's assertion that all dreams articulate wish fulfillment. It remains for the intepreter of the dream to decode in the manifest dream content the dream distortion and allocate significance and latent logic to that content. As Freud puts it, dream interpretation is meant to "detect a latent dream content whose significance far surpasses that of the manifest dream-content" (Freud 70). This comes down to a method of un derstanding that symbolism is relevant to human experience and a method of understanding the reality of the mind and of the intersection of the mind with its cosmos.
Freud's terminology embeds definition in the words of the terms themselves. Thus day residue (actual events that have been experienced by the dreamer but that may appear in distorted form in events or images of a dream),...