Wish-Fulfillment
This theme is explicitly stated early in the book: “When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish." From that point forward, the rest of the text sets about either as a matter of intent or a by-product of interpretation to prove this thesis. The problem for the psychoanalyst—not to mention the patient—is that the wish which the dreamer is trying to fulfill through his unconscious also happens to be filtered through the unconscious so that more often than not the interpretation is dependent not just upon deciphering the content of the dream, but trying to figure out is being wished for when the dreamer isn’t even aware.
Repression
The key to interpreting the meaning of a dream as a wish fulfillment that the dreamer doesn’t even realize they are wishing for is manifested as another primary theme explored throughout the text. The wish that the dream hopes to fulfill is not your standard “I want to be an astronaut” or “I hope so-and-so will fall in love me.” According to Freud, dreams are the specific domain of wishes that have been repressed. The concept of repressed desire has worked its way into the mainstream, but in a way not entirely consistent with how it is outlined in the text. Repressed desires have taken on the aspect of things wished-for too disturbing for one reason or another for the mind to allow into conscious apprehension, but the fact is that everybody is aware of those desires they would least like other people to know they have. Those kinds of thoughts too disturbing to deal that are effectively banned from conscious thought are examples of suppression. (Which can also be realized in dream imagery.) Repressed desires, however, are not necessarily too disturbing to deal with, but are instead set aside by the conscious mind long enough for the unconscious to grab hold of them and not even allow a person to remember having them. Just because you don’t consciously remember having a certain desire by no means indicates that the desire is too emotionally upsetting to stick around in the consciousness. So dream interpretation is not necessarily always about confronting some horrible traumatic memory.
Infantile Desires
The third key element to dream interpretation is the understanding that desires which have been repressed occurred during early childhood. The mind needs to be immature and undeveloped to allowed the mechanism of true repression—rather than suppression—to work itself out. This is the stimulus behind the jokes related to psychoanalysis about the mother always being to blame for a person’s adult anxieties. The joke is not true, of course, since not every child had a mother for one thing and for another not all repressed desire involve mothers or fathers or parents at all. That the wish which a dream tries to fulfill is one repressed since childhood further complicates the process of interpretation and, in the process, essentially nullifies all generic dream symbolism which has become part of pop culture. Imagery in a dream only becomes a symbol of the repression trying to burst into the conscious mind as it specifically relates to individual experiences. Or, as Freud famously observes, sometimes a cigar in a dream is just a cigar.
