The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud

 I am not too much into interpreting dreams but I felt its useful to know when I picked up this classic by Sigmund Freud - it was published in 1899 and brought the theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation (which later became the theory of  the Oedipus Complex). I did not really get a full grip of how to interpret dreams but got an idea of how Freud went about it. 

The book starts with a concise report of scientific literature of dream problems up to 1900. Earlier thoughts aboout dreams were that they were god-sent and were either prophecies or such stuff. Freud tried a psychological technique to interpret dreams with every dream having a structure, assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities  of the waking state. He tried to connect them to the waking state, thus addressing memory and sensation as well.

Many dreams of various people are interpreted and most are Freud's own dreams that have been analysed by himself. The primary dream under analysis is that of 'Irma's Injection' which is a dream about a patient whose treatment went wrong and the dream is about how he seeks to be exonerated from the mistake by blaming it on another doctor. Freud says that dreams have two mental processes 1) unconscious forces that construct a wish expressed by the dream 2)  process of censorship that forcibly distorts the expression of the wish. Somewhere it is said that all dreams re about wish fulfillment. 

One can differentiate between manifest content (remembered narrative) and latent content (underlying meaning of the dream). During sleep the unconscious condenses and displaces and forms representations of the dream content, the latent content of which is not recognisable upon waking.

Every dream, Freud says, has a connection with an experience of the previous day. The dream content can be selected from any part of the dreamer's life. There are four possible sources of dreams 1) mentally significant experiences represented directly 2) general recent experiences consolidated into one 3) one or more experiences represented by contemporary but different experiences 4) an internal experience represented in the dream by a mention of a recent but indifferent impression.

Freud discusses the aspects of wish fulfillment, distortion, censorship in dreams etc. For the material and sources of dreams j=he looks at infantile experiences and somatic sources 1) embarrassment dreams 2) dreams of death and 3) exam dreams. The actual dream work consists of condensation into symbols - hat as a man, little one as a genital 3) being run over as sexual intercourse 4) buildings and stairs represent genitals 5) people represent male organs, landscapes rep female organs etc. The psychology of dream processes includes forgetting of dreams, how our memory falsifies through psychic censorship, regression, suppression etc.

Thought impulses that continue to sleep are 1) those that haven;t been completed such as unsolved problems 2) those left uncompleted due to accident 3) those that have been suppressed 4)indifferent impressions of the day.

It is an interesting book and may warrant a second read to get deeper into this subject. But for now, glad I read it and got some idea into how Freud tried to interpret dreams and how he connected dreams to the waking state and how our wishes are represented as symbols etc.