Dream Interpretation

Dream interpretation, or analysis, was created by Freud as a way to understand the unconscious mind. Freud wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams to explain to the world his analysis of dreams. Freud's book first argues that dreams are "day residue", things that happened during the day or things that you wished happened during the day happen in your dreams. For example, in a small child's dream, a boy played with a turtle and had a thought that it would be cool if the turtle was able to talk. So in his dream he went deep sea diving with a large, talking turtle. In adults, dreams tend to be more complicated. Dreams are rarely cut and dry, subject to obvious interpretation. First, there is something called manifest content and latent content. Manifest content is the content of a dream that a person experiences and remembers. Latent content is the hidden and unconscious meaning of the dream. Our dreams are like a puzzle, something that we have to piece together to discern the latent content, which is to say, to figure out what the dream means.