Why persons dream, what they dream, and what their dreams mean, are subjects of interest to a wide range of researchers, and a wide range of artists and clinical practitioners. The Interpretation of Dreams looks at what dreams mean intrinsically and at what meanings dreams make for waking dreamers. It must also be recognized that the perspective from which Freud examines and interprets dreams is that of the professional psychologist and that the clinical neurosis of the subjects of his interpretations is to be presumed. To put it another way, Freud's subjects are patients, but the conclusions that he draws from observing them and interpreting their dreams are generalized to the human condition as a whole.
Three premises dominate Freud's approach to explaining the role of dreams in the human psyche. One is that "interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." In other words, determining the meaning and significance of a dream may provide clues to the real nature of a dreamer's psyche. Once a dream is interpreted or decoded and the latent content or actual meaning is discov ered, then the implications of such content can be dealt with at the dreamer's conscious level. The second Freudian premise is this: "The dream is the guardian of sleep, not its disturber. . . . The wish to sleep . . . must thus always be taken into account as a motive of dream formation" (Freud 287. The third premise, which flows from the second, is that "every successful dream is a fulfilment of this wish" (Freud 287).
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 categ...