10. Freud argued that dreams are examples of wish fulfillment
Freud presented dreams as a form of wish fulfillment, expressed in pictures by the unconscious. For a wish to be fulfilled, there must be a want which has been denied, followed by the wish for the denial to be overturned. Freud postulated that dreams contain two separate messages. One is conveyed by what is remembered of the dream, which he called the manifest content. The other Freud called the latent content, the thoughts beneath the images presented in the dream. To Freud, the images were censored by the mind to disguise their true meaning, and interpretation required the understanding of what the images represented.
To Freud, all dreams have latent meanings, though they differ for every individual based on their own experiences and memories. Thus, dreaming of a house cannot mean the same thing for everyone, as is posited by dream dictionaries. “I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible”, Freud wrote. The interpretation was based on his principle of free association, in which the dreamer speaks whatever comes to mind when considering the dream, without criticism, and without another telling them what they believed the dream to mean.