Dreams have always been a topic of interest for not only theorists such as Freud, but for people of the general population. Whether it is a nightmare, an enjoyable or simple strange dream, one always asks: what does that dream really mean? Is it insinuating something deeper about my life? Is it pure fiction or does it have elements of truth? Is what I experience on a regular basis in my dreams an indication about the person I am? These are questions that I often come up with when thinking about dreams. For Freud, dreams can be in fact interpreted and are not at all random or absurd occurrences but rather have meaning. Dreams are “wish fulfillment”; they serve the purpose of fulfilling a desire and satisfying the dreamer. This desire is nonetheless unconscious and thus, its meaning must be interpreted. In this sense, the dream functions as a means of understanding what is truly going on in someone’s mind. But since the content of dreams can sometimes be disturbing, it must be repressed and enters the consciousness under a “masked” form. In other words, these dreams are not what they appear to be and must be interpreted further in order to determine their true meaning in the realm of the unconscious.
Freud explains the difference between the manifest content and latent content of dreams. On the one hand, the manifest content refers to the dream as the dreamer tells it. This dream is believed to disguise a repressed desire and therefore, needs to be interpreted in order to uncover its latent content. The latent content is the product of the interpretation of the dream, its symbolic meaning. This is what is of particular interest to psychoanalysis since the latent content of a dream is what reveals the hidden meanings.
Dreams naturally refer to the events in our day-to-day lives. Last night, for example, my younger sister dreamt about her soccer game that took place this afternoon. It was a competitive match-up and a game that she had been looking forward to for a long time, so her dream-content was very much related to her desire to win the match (they won the game by the way!). However, Freud explains that in many instances dreams can be distorted, their real significance concealed by the latent content. Freud defines the dream-work to be the system that connects the manifest and latent dream-thoughts and aims to understand the mechanism by which the manifest content of dreams transforms into the latent dream-thoughts.
The processes of condensation and displacement are two ways by which Freud believes such a transformation can occur. First, condensation occurs when a number of dream-elements are combined into one, so that the dream becomes more condensed than the dream-thoughts. As Freud states, “Dreams are brief, meagre, and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts” (401). Second, displacement happens when your dream refers to one thing whereas your dream-thoughts seem to reveal that it was about something else. This operation masks the true meaning of your dream by displacing the emotion associated to one idea (something that may be embarrassing) to a totally different idea. This happens in day-to-day situations when for example, we take out our anger on others but are simply upset about something else. My question is that if the dream “gives no more than a distortion of the dream-wish that exists in the unconscious” (412), how does one come to explain the role of nightmares from a Freudian perspective?