Neuroscience has challenged Freud’s ideas about dreams. Nevertheless, Freud was the one who made us realise dreams can be meaningful.

Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams late in 1899. It has outsized importance among his writings as arguably the founding document of psychoanalysis. In his own estimation, the book contains ’the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make'.

When I first became interested in psychoanalysis, the Pelican Freud Library was the mother lode. Launched in 1973, this first English-language paperback edition of Freud’s major writings was intended for a general readership. Its colourful covers brightened many a student’s bookshelf.

Psychoanalysts and bookshelves no longer have the same cachet among students, and the general reader has other priorities. But Joyce Crick’s 1999 translation has now been published in the Oxford World Classics series, certifying the book as a literary masterwork. It deserves that status.

Though it is a treatise on dreams, Freud’s book introduced a new way of thinking about the mind that reverberated through the 20th century. Although the impact of psychoanalysis has dwindled in the Anglosphere, its ideas continue to shape how we understand mental health, therapy and human nature itself.

Freud opens his book with an extended review of dream theories, from the ancient Greeks to more recent psychologists and philosophers. These theories speculate on how dreams relate to the preceding day’s experiences, how they respond to the stimuli that impinge on us – from outside and within – while we sleep, and why we struggle to recall them on waking.

These early dream theories offered differing views on the function of dreaming and the sleeping brain’s capacities. Some viewed dreams as works of creative imagination and prophecy, whereas others wrote them off as residues of a weakened mind.

To Freud, what is fundamental to dreams is their ‘psychical strangeness’. They appear to take place in a different location from waking consciousness: in a different theatre, not merely under a dimmer light.

In addition to their enigmatic quality, Freud emphasises how dreams lack sense and logic:

The dream is incoherent, without compunction it unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.

The dream is incoherent, without compunction it unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside........

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