SUMMARY OF THE THEORY

Freud (1900/1961) claimed that dreams were attempts to fulfil peremptory wishes, arising
during sleep, derived from appetitive (‘libidinal’) urges. He based this claim on findings from
a purely subjective method: he collected dreamers’ associations to the individual elements of
their dreams and then inferred implicit, underlying themes from the converging semantic and
affective links.The ‘latent’ thoughts revealed in this way, Freud observed, were always wishful
— notwithstanding the fact that manifest dreams assume a wide variety of forms, some of
which (e.g. nightmares) appear anything but wishful.
The differences between the ‘manifest’ and the ‘latent’ content of dreams led Freud to infer
an intervening process, by means of which the unconscious wishes could be transformed into
conscious dreams.This intervening process was the so-called dream-work, which involved
mechanisms such as ‘displacement’ (substituting representational elements for one another,
e.g. your father is represented as a policeman),‘condensation’ (combining multiple elements
into composite hybrids, e.g. ambition, excitement and anxiety are all represented by a single
image of an ascending escalator) and ‘regression’ (converting thoughts into perceptions, e.g.
a person’s importance is represented by their size).
Why did Freud think the mind functioned in this peculiar way during sleep? He offered
a cascade of hypotheses.The sleeping mind is disconnected from external reality but not
from its innate (instinctual) dispositions.These dispositions are unmodulated during sleep by
the constraints of external reality. Goal-directed motor activity is unusual during sleep.The
motivational programmes that are activated during sleep (and especially the peremptory ones,
activated from instinctual sources) cannot readily be discharged in motor activity during sleep.
Sleep and goal-directed action are, for the most part,mutually exclusive states. Instead of
acting on one’s wishes during sleep, therefore, one imagines oneself acting on them.This
imaginary (hallucinatory) fulfilment of the wish defers the pressure to act. Hence Freud’s
claim that ‘dreams are the guardians of sleep’.
However, the unconstrained imaginings of the sleeping mind themselves threaten to disturb
sleep (i.e. they arouse anxiety).The process of dream-work is therefore tendentiously biased
in favour of more acceptable representational elements and narratives.This bias is our mind’s
‘censorship’.To the extent that the censorship fails to disguise disturbing dream thoughts
adequately, the process fails and the dreamer awakens (typically from an anxiety dream).