This chapter watches Freud develop and deploy his approach to dreaming. The chapter reviews the first three of five chapters that develop his vision of dreaming from observation.

Those chapters provide the core of Freud’s book’s argument, to wit: Dreams can be inserted into dreamers’ waking thought through a process of interpretation based in dreamers’ retrieval of memories and conjuring of impressions related to the elements of the dream. The process permits the identification of a wish the dream has fulfilled: A state of affairs dreamers would be happy to see come to pass. At least adult dreams rarely express directly wishes of the sort to which interpretation leads, wishes we would hesitate to express openly. Accordingly, Freud posits a process of distortion that converts the wish-fulfillment into unobjectionable, if bewildering, form.