Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is a foundational work of modern psychology, and the first book to really help us understand dreams.

Much had been written about dreams before Freud, from Aristotle and up to contemporary figures such as Maury, Burdach, Delage and Strumpell. Yet Freud notes, “In spite of being concerned with the subject over many thousands of years, scientific understanding of the dream has not

Dreams were originally seen as “an inspiration from the divine”. By Freud’s time they were considered the result of “sensory excitation”. While sleeping, for instance, you hear a noise outside, and that noise becomes woven into the dream in order to make sense of it.

Alfred Maury, the physician whom Freud knew, dreamed of a maid carrying a huge pile of dishes, which finally fell onto the floor. The “clattering” of the dishes was in fact his alarm clock going off.

According to this explanation, common dreams such as finding yourself naked are the result of your bed clothes falling off, flying dreams are caused by the rising and falling of the lungs, and so on.

But Freud felt that sensory stimuli did not explain all dreams. There was also an ethical or moral dimension to some of them which did not suggest merely physical causes, but rather important unresolved issues to do with the self.

Freud worked as a physician, and his interest in dreams came from working with people with psychoses. He realized that the content of patients’ dreams were a good indicator of their state of mental health. Dreams were like physical symptoms in that you could analyze and interpret

It is fashionable to say that The Interpretation of Dreams is more a work of literature than science. Indeed, Freud’s rich description and analysis of dreams can easily run to a dozen pages each and draw upon his considerable learning in mythology, art and literature.

Yet he brought a medical and scientific approach to a subject which had always defied real analysis.

By the time he came to write The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud had clinically interpreted over a thousand dreams. In doing so, he was slowly developing a science of the unconscious mind. Next, we turn to his conclusions.