The Interpretation of Dreams

In Chapter 6, Freud delves into the topic of the "dream-work," which he defines as the process by which the latent dream thoughts are transformed into the manifest content of the dream. He argues, “the dream-content (manifest content) appears to us as a translation of the dream-thoughts (latent content) into another mode of expression” (191) and that this translation is governed by certain "laws" (191) or principles. It is these laws this chapter explores.

A. Condensation

The first principle is condensation, which refers to the process by which multiple thoughts and wishes are combined into a single image or idea in the dream, such that a dream is relatively short, yet its interpretation yields multitudes. Condensation allows the dreamer to express a number of repressed thoughts and wishes at once, rather than having to deal with each one separately.

For example, a dreamer may dream of being in a house, which represents different aspects of their life, such as their home and their family. As this example suggests, condensation organizes groups of thoughts into “one of their conceptual elements” (194) that is capable of representing or otherwise uniting them: It “is a veritable nucleus, and, for the dream, the meeting-point of many trains of thought” (195).

Since dream images are so densely connected to dream thoughts, each aspect of the manifest content “proves to be over-determined” (195), or symbolically related to the majority of the dream’s latent content. From this overdetermination comes the transformations we often see in dreams. For instance, a person "may construct a composite person in yet another fashion, by combining the actual features of two or more persons in a single dream-image” (200). Because manifest content is multiply determined, it is also unstable and plastic: From “elements which occur several times over in the dream-content, the formation of new unities” (202) occurs. As well as composite persons, this is also frequently expressed in composite words (i.e., neologisms) (202-4). This is another connection between dreams and children as well as persons with psychotic disorders, who also often produce new words. On this latter topic, Freud is correct: Neologisms, or the creation of new words, is a common symptom of schizophrenia.

B. Displacement

A second principle is displacement, the process by which the intensity of an emotion is transferred from the original idea to a different, usually less important idea. This displacement allows the dreamer to express their repressed thoughts and wishes in a less threatening or disguised way. This is essentially the same as the concept of censorship and distortion which Freud discussed in Chapter 4. Freud refers to this phenomenon as displacement since it creates dreams in which “the dream is, as it were, centered elsewhere; its content is arranged about elements which do not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts” (207). Dealing centrally with these topics would be too emotionally difficult for the dreamer, so they are only alluded to.

Since displacement and condensation co-occur, the content of the dream that seems most relevant to all latent content is often not the most significant aspect of the dream:

[A] psychic force expresses itself in the dream-work which, on the one hand, strips the elements of the high psychic value of their intensity and, on the other hand, by means of over-determination, creates new significant values from elements of slight value, which new values then make their way into the dream-content (208).

Since representing this latent content is forced out via displacement, condensation focuses on other, less significant content. Together, “[d]ream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly ascribe the structure of the dream” (209).

C. The Means of Representation in Dreams

This section focuses on how dreams organize their content in order to make a point. Unlike sentences or arguments, dreams do not have an inherent structure of relations between their components, through which the interpreter can infer the underlying point. The dream does, however, have other methods to intimate “at least the intention” (213). One is grouping like images together to emphasize a concept: “Whenever it shows two elements close together, it vouches for a particularly intimate connection between their corresponding representatives in the dream-thoughts” (214). In making causal arguments, dreams separate events and their conclusions into two separate dreams in the space of one night. In suggesting "either-or" relationships, the dream supplies both, providing the common sense in dreams that certain objects have multiple identities: "It was either a garden or a living-room" (215).

Similarity or agreement are “generally expressed in dreams by contraction into a unity” (218), such as the example of composite persons above. Dreams are also “absolutely egoistic” (219), and whenever the self does not appear in the dream, one should assume the self is represented by another figure. Dreams represent negation through inversion, when the ego wishes ‘If only it were the other way about!" (223), or when we experience a sensation of immobility or incapability. Sometimes the intensity of dream imagery relates to “psychic value; the most intense elements are in fact the most significant” (224). Conditionality, i.e., "if this, then that" statements, are represented by simultaneity.

These first three sections are examples of Freud’s detailed attention to the content and structure of dreams and his attempts to systematically account for them. This is best exemplified in section C, in which the varied relations of objects in dreams are given specific communicative values. However, the most significant of Freudian concepts brought forward so far in this chapter are those of condensation and displacement. These two processes are central to dream interpretation but also offer insight into how the unconscious mind formulates its content in relation to waking life, or the essentially symbolic nature of our unconscious world. Together, these concepts help to explain the symbolic and often confusing nature of dreams, as well as the way in which our unconscious mind processes and organizes our experiences and emotions.

All three of these sections emphasize how seemingly insignificant aspects of the dream in fact serve as ciphers to its deeper latent content. Although this again serves as an advertisement for the value of skilled psychoanalysis, such a perspective is also capable of obscuring explanations of dream content that are already known. In discussing the sensation of inhibited movement in dreams, Freud states that it is “inadequate, to answer that there is motor paralysis in sleep, which manifests itself by means of the sensation alluded to” (229). Freud gives no justification for why this explanation is "inadequate," and as such dispenses with his own contemporary—as well as our modern—theory explaining such events, which does in fact explain them through motor paralysis in sleep.

At the same time, some of Freud’s ideas are quite relevant to modern scientific understanding of dreams. One example from this chapter is Freud’s concept of the dream as "entirely egoistical." Modern interpretations of dreams do indeed suggest that dreams relate to temporary loss of agency and its attribution to invented agents (e.g., McNamara’s "diminished agency" theory in dreams). Of course, these theories do not rely on the complex concepts of distortion, displacement, and condensation, nor on any concept of the unconscious, to make their claims.

D. Regard for Representability

Another form of displacement is “an exchange of the verbal expression for the thought in question” (231): literal renderings of figurative language, or images that become interpretable via considering their linguistic status. Freud gives several example dreams, including one of a conductor in a tower, who "towers" over the dreamer because of his high social status.

E. Representation in Dreams by Symbols: Some Further Typical Dreams

Freud writes, “Symbolism does not appertain especially to dreams, but rather to the unconscious imagination” (239, emphasis added). In other words, the essential language of the unconscious is symbolism. Some symbolic relations are quite common to dreams and suggest etymological relationships between symbol and reference that existed historically: “What is today symbolically connected was probably united, in primitive times, by conceptual and linguistic identity” (239). Particularly common symbols are of a sexual nature, such as phallic symbols: “[A]ll sharp and elongated weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes, represent the male member" (241). Freud gives several other examples of masculine and feminine symbols: “To play with or to beat a little child is often the dream's representation of masturbation. The dream-work represents castration by baldness” (242) etc.

Freud’s point in discussing the symbolism of dreams is that only some symbols have constant meanings, relating to our evolutionary history. Other than sex, “to depart is one of the most frequent and one of the most readily established of the death-symbols” (255). Dental dreams in men relate to “masturbatory desires of puberty” (255) and “according to CG Jung, dreams due to dental stimulus in the case of women have the significance of parturition dreams” (257). Dreams of rescue also relate to parturition. Dreams of flying repeat infantile sensations of floating in games with parents and often, for men, also relate to erections.

Dreams of falling connote anxiety or, in women, of “giving way to an erotic temptation” (259). Those who dream of swimming “have usually been bed-wetters" who "now repeat in the dream a pleasure which they have long since learned to forego” (259). Dreams of “life in the womb” relate to “dread of being buried alive, [and] [...] belief in a life after death” (263). Freud once again invokes the idea of wish fulfillment, claiming, “the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes” (259). Both analysts and patients are often resistant to this reality, which is why censorship produces such widely varied symbols for it.

In this section, Freud again provides some instances of typical dreams and offers support for an understanding of unconscious life similar to Jung’s later concept of the collective unconscious. Indeed, the explanation for why such commonalities exist is the same—as a product of our evolutionary history and the common concerns of survival throughout these early times. Freud departs from the Jungian theory, however, in his almost exclusive emphasis on sexual imagery: The primacy of sexuality as a psychic force relates to Freud’s concept of the libido, or sexual energy innervating our life and drives. This focus on libido as a psychic force over varied forces conceptualized through archetypes is indeed the major split between Jungian and Freudian theory that resulted in the eventual division between these two scholars.

F. Examples: Arithmetic and Speech in Dreams

Freud cites several examples of the use of numbers and linguistic play in dreams, emphasizing the importance of language play in dreams, which he brought out in section D: “[O]ne scarcely finds a dream without a double meaning or a play upon words” (267). Similarly, numbers take on a double meaning in dreams: “[F]or example, 5:15 a.m. means to one dreamer the age of five years and three months; when he was that age, a younger brother was born” (268). These numeric relations can become complex, such as a difference in the value of an item and the amount paid for it relating to anxiety over marrying too early, when one’s value was high (271).

Regarding speech, “the dream-work cannot compose a new speech” (272) but only reformulate waking speech. In other words, the dream cannot craft new statements, but can only alter recently recalled speech and fit it into the context of the dream.

G. Absurd Dreams—Intellectual Performances in Dreams

Freud uses "absurdity" to mean two facts being true at once, such as a dream about one’s father dying in a train wreck while remembering, even within the dream, that the father is already dead by other means. Freud relates this not to two conflicting memories of the father but to a recent memory of a sculpture of the father that the son had commissioned, with the dream conflating the two. Absurdity is a “result of a carelessness of verbal expression, which does not distinguish between the bust or the photograph and the original” (278): the result of condensation of two waking subjects into one dream subject.

Many dreams concern dead loved ones. This absurdity is often rectified by noting the dream is a literalization of the question we often ask ourselves—“If my father were still alive, what would he say to this?" (279)—or that the dream serves as self-scorn through the image of the repudiating parent. Dreams also become absurd if within some of the latent content is a feeling of absurdity toward a topic. The contention “that is nonsense” (282) will result in a nonsense dream. In short, “the dream-thoughts are never absurd [...] the dream-work produces absurd dreams [...] when the dream-thoughts contain criticism, ridicule, and derision, which have to be given expression” (289).

Intellectual activity in dreams is the product of latent content that "has found its way from these, as a completed structure, into the manifest dream-content” (290). This is true also of judgments made about the dream immediately after waking: They still belong to the latent content and need to be analyzed as such.

H. The Affects in Dreams

According to Freud, the dream “presses its claim to be accepted as part of our real psychic experiences, by virtue of its affective rather than its ideational content” (300, emphasis added). What is most "real" about dreams are their included emotions, which often resemble how we feel about subjects in real life: “If I am afraid of robbers in my dreams, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real" (300, emphasis added).

Affect in dream applies to the latent content, explaining why in some dreams emotions do not seem to match their subject: “In my dream I may be in a horrible, dangerous, or disgusting situation, and yet I may feel no fear or aversion” (300), as the horrible situation is simply a manifestation of the latent content, which the dreamer does not feel horrible about. Freud gives several examples, including a dream of three lions the dreamer runs from but does not fear, since they represent three friendly people in her life. The dream-work often suppresses the affect of the latent content in the manifest content.

Freud addresses the problem of why some dreams appear indifferent while others are marked by vivid affect from the latent content. Freud suggests two reasons. First, sleep naturally suppresses the affect, allowing few emotions through to conscious thought in dreaming. Second, when latent thoughts contain many intense emotions, they inhibit each other such that the manifest content is relatively devoid of emotion. Since the purposes of wish fulfillment in dreams often reverse the content of undesirable thoughts, affect in the latent content is also at times reversed in the manifest content—such as laughing in a dream when one encounters the figure of death (309). However, when multiple thoughts contain the same affect, these sources “combine in the dream-work in order to produce it” (313)—an inversion of the inhibition from conflicting affects. Sometimes, the dominant mood of the preceding day may penetrate dreams, receiving similar treatment as somatic stimuli do in dreams.

Dreams that create such reversals for the purposes of wish fulfillment are referred to as “hypocritical” dreams (309). Freud gives an example of dreams of oneself in a low social position when one is in fact prideful and high-status. These hypocritical dreams are “punishment-dreams, as distinguished from wish-fulfilling dreams” (311), which fulfill a masochistic drive.

In these sections, Freud continues a systematic investigation of the varied components of dreams and their relationship to psychic life. Throughout, Freud’s central point has remained firmly in grasp: Dreams are windows into the workings and concerns of the unconscious mind, but dreams do not express these workings and concerns directly. Instead, they communicate through symbols. The dream does this in order to obscure the latent content from conscious thought since, should it be communicated directly to conscious thought, it would immediately be rejected.

This chapter is therefore primarily concerned with the ways latent content is disguised into manifest content and how the latent content can be perceived through the manifest content by the interpreter. As this process has been undertaken, Freud seems at times to slip from what was the central thesis on dreams prior to the introduction of the concept of distortion: that dreams are wish fulfillments. In these later sections, the function of all dreams as wish fulfillments again gathers clarity. For example, dreams of the death of a loved one fulfill a wish of contact with them or their guidance. Dreams of childhood entertain the wish to return to such experiences. Dreams of the self in low status positions engage the psychic wish to regulate the ego through humility, fulfilling natural masochistic drives. In this way, even complex dream content can be seen through the lens of wish fulfillment.

I. The Secondary Elaboration

In some occurrences, “psychic functions which cannot be differentiated from our waking thoughts may make contributions to the dream-content” (319). In other words, we may react to dream content not with dream affects but with thoughts resembling those of our waking hours, such as thinking "this is only a dream" while within one. Freud takes this phenomenon as a sign that “the psychic agency, which is otherwise active only as the censorship, play[s] a constant part in dream-formation” (320).

It is through the presence of this psychic agency that “the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible experience” (321). Such thoughts are, in some sense, interpretations prior to waking interpretation. However, since the meaning they find for the dream is “very far removed from the real meaning of the dream” (321), they are better understood as “secondary elaborations” (321) rather than interpretations in their own right.

Freud digresses to discuss daydreams, which he sees as “predecessors of symptoms of hysteria” (321) that , like daydreams “are dependent not upon actual memories, but upon the phantasies built up on a basis of memories” (322). Daydreams are also wish fulfillments, based in childhood experiences, and are formulated through censorship. Returning to secondary elaboration, he notes that this “fourth dream-forming factor” (the others being censorship, condensation, and representability) “seeks to construct something like a day-dream from the [dream] material” (322), making the unstructured reality of the dream into something more like a fantasy. This is done in order to give the dream structure, much like we do in waking consciousness when filling in absent components of patterns: For example, we “overlook errors which make nonsense of a printed page because we imagine the proper words” (327).

At times this factor will pull waking daydreams or memories into the dream-work in order to accomplish this. This fact explains why short bouts of sleep can produce long dream narratives: “This phantasy is not run through in sleep, but only in the memory of the awakened sleeper” (326), like a few notes of a song conjuring the memory of the entire piece. After such examination, we can note that this fourth factor, “the psychic agency which approaches the dream-content with the demand that it must be intelligible [...] is none other than our normal thought” (328).

Overall, psychic activity in dreams is of two general types: “the production of the dream-thoughts and the transformation of these into the dream-content” (331). The dream thoughts are “thoughts which have not become conscious” (331), and the process of their transformation into dream content is the “peculiar and characteristic” (331) aspect of dreams, a process “altogether different, qualitatively, from waking thought” (331) governed by the dimensions this chapter has explained. Primary among these is the role of censorship, which spurs the displacement, distortion, and other activities of dreams.

In this section, Freud begins a complex discussion of the different psychic "agents" active during sleep and wakefulness and their effects on the dreams. This discussion will come to its clearest expression in Chapter 7’s discussion of "psi-systems" of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind. Here, Freud focuses on the process of secondary elaboration, which is the interpretation or "elaboration" of dream content produced by the unconscious via a conscious or semiconscious aspect of the mind, which is also present during dreaming.

The purpose of this elaboration is to structure the dream into an intelligible narrative. Such discussion of the multiple agents of the mind, each with their own role in the psyche and style of communication, is a reminder of the core function of distortion that Freud outlines in Chapter 4. Here, therefore, his assertion that in fact the conscious mind is in some part involved in interpreting dreams even as they take form is somewhat counterintuitive. When viewed in light of modern neuroscience, which places less emphasis on discrete conscious and unconscious selves and instead emphasizes the role of varied, integrated brain processes (some of which are conscious and others nonconscious, automatic, and computational), the logic becomes somewhat clearer. A brain area capable of self-reference or narrativizing—for instance, the prefrontal cortex—is activated during sleep mentation and engages the stimulus of the dream experienced by other brain regions (e.g., the "activation synthesis model" of dreaming).

Freud's seeming ability to predict future discoveries relevant to both the psyche and dreams has much to do with his keen attention to the many different aspects of dream life. In his argument that secondary elaboration serves as a pattern prediction process, Freud provides just another such example of his foresight. In the theory of Gestalt principles of perception, varied stimuli are fit into categories based on partial aspects of their appearance, allowing humans to rapidly process complex stimuli such as vast visual scenes.

Human perception is, in this view, a sort of pattern-recognition machine that, as varied theories in cognitive science such as the "predictive processing theory" attest, actually requires not only pattern recognition but pattern prediction to function properly. Freud’s concept that secondary elaboration is such a prediction, and that what we perceive is not the stimulus of the dream but the complete pattern that we perceive the dream to take part in, is wholly coherent with this theory.