Dream Work

Freud introduced the notion of "dream work" to clearly emphasize that the dream is not the result, as was generally thought to be the case, of a weakened state of mental activity producing incoherent fragments, but, on the contrary, the outcome of very complex psychic work.

This was the notion that was articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), based on a fundamental hypothesis: the dream represents a fulfillment of desires that are repressed in waking life, but this realization is typically disguised so as to pass...