Dream Psychology

For most of history nobody wondered where a dream came from. It arrived from outside - a favour from the gods or a trap laid by demons - and the only question was what it wanted from you.

By Freud’s time educated people had quietly dropped that. A dream, they agreed, is the dreamer’s own mental act, made in her own head out of her own material.

But notice what left along with the gods. Once nobody was sending the dream, nobody could say what it meant. Freud splits the question in two: what dreaming does for the mind as a whole, and - the one this course starts with - whether a single dream, last night’s, can be made to make sense.