About this audiobook
Sigmund Freud approaches dreams as experiences that can be interpreted rather than dismissed as meaningless fragments. Through accounts of his own dreams and those described by others, he develops an argument about the relationship between remembered images and thoughts that are not immediately available to consciousness. The familiar act of dreaming becomes a setting for his theory of mental life.
Freud distinguishes the dream as recalled from the meanings he believes analysis can uncover. He describes processes such as condensation and displacement to explain how, in his account, underlying thoughts take altered forms. Examples and extended interpretations show the reasoning through which he connects dreams with wishes, memory and conflict.
The book presents an influential historical theory, not a universal code for decoding dreams. Its interest lies in the scope of Freud's interpretive project and the questions it raises about evidence, self-understanding and the meanings people seek in experiences that seem at once intimate and obscure.
