Do you wonder what your dreams really mean? How does your mind transform raw unconscious desires into the strange narratives and symbols you remember when you wake up?
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud writes that our minds try to disguise our hidden wishes. According to Freud, dream work is a process that helps transform deep unconscious material into the dreams we experience.
Read more to discover how you might uncover the hidden meanings behind your dreams.
An Exploration of Dream Work
According to Freud, dream work happens when your mind engages in processes that rearrange the latent content from your unconscious into the manifest content of your dreams. Dream work processes include symbolism, condensation, displacement, and secondary revision.
Symbolism
Freud writes that your unconscious operates primarily through images, not language. Therefore, it expresses abstract concepts, desires, and conflicts through symbols and metaphors in dreams. For example, a dream about traveling may represent a desire to move in a new direction in life. While Freud documents many recurring motifs in his patients, he notes that symbols often draw from each dreamer’s unique life and vary from person to person.
(Shortform note: The idea that dreams represent their meaning through symbolism predates the field of Western psychology, appearing in many of the world’s oldest books on dream interpretation. Duke Zhou’s Book of Dreams, from China in the 12th century BCE, provides a dictionary of dream symbols and their possible meanings. An Egyptian papyrus from the 13th century BCE divides a list of dream symbols into “good” and “bad” omens. Finally, the Oneirocritica, a Greek manual on interpreting dreams from the 2nd century CE, draws a distinction between “direct” and “allegorical” dreams, suggesting that dreams can be either literal or symbolic.)
Condensation
Through the process of condensation, your mind combines multiple thoughts, experiences, and strands of symbolic meaning into a single dream element or situation. According to Freud, condensation allows the same dream imagery to represent different ideas and wishes at once. For example, a dream figure representing your mother could simultaneously connote ideas about nurturing, authority, and disapproval—all of which may stem from distinct childhood memories.
(Shortform note: Freudian ideas have influenced fields outside of psychology, including criticism of literature and media. The idea of condensation is especially useful when analyzing media, since symbols and words often carry multiple meanings at once. For example, some scholars argue that rhetoric becomes more impactful when using words that condense multiple meanings and associations together.)
Displacement
Freud writes that in displacement, your unconscious disguises the true sources of your repressed desires by transferring them to a more acceptable symbolic substitute. This protects you from directly confronting the anxiety-provoking root of those feelings.
Let’s say that you feel angry toward your boss. Your censor represses these feelings because you can’t express them at work. Dream work then transfers your anger to a more acceptable object: For example, you may have a dream about being angry at a mailman who keeps stealing your packages. This transference simultaneously fulfills your wish of expressing anger and your wish of staying on good terms with your boss.
(Shortform note: According to some psychologists, displacement commonly occurs outside of dreams as well. When someone feels an intense emotion that they can’t direct at its actual cause, they may redirect it toward a target they find more acceptable. For example, someone who is bullied may find someone weaker to lash out at instead of standing up to their bully, expressing their anger without the risk of confrontation.)
Secondary Revision
To further disguise underlying unconscious meanings and make your dream narrative more coherent, Freud suggests that your mind imposes order and logic onto raw disjointed dream images. This “secondary revision” process strings together dream scenes into a superficially meaningful sequence or story, further obscuring your dream’s true source in irrational primary unconscious thoughts.
(Shortform note: Researchers have found that all memories, not just dreams, can change when you try to remember them. This is because when we remember an experience, our brains actively reconstruct our memories by taking selective cues and then using imagination to fill in the gaps.)
