The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud (trans. A. A. Brill) · 1913

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About the book

The book Freud himself ranked above everything else he wrote: dreams are not nonsense but wishes, disguised just well enough to get past an inner censor. Brill's 1913 translation is the one that carried psychoanalysis into English, strangeness intact.

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Part 1 · What dreams were before Freud. The first six slides, free.

What dreams were before Freud

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You wake from a vivid dream and, for a moment, it feels like something that happened to you rather than something you made. Freud thinks this morning impression is where the oldest theory of dreams came from.

Before Aristotle, he writes, people did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind at all. It was a message from outside, a divine inspiration, and it came in two kinds: true and valuable dreams sent to warn the dreamer or foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent dreams meant to lead him to ruin.

Freud does not mock this. He calls it perfectly in keeping with a world that projected outward what was real only inside the mind. The dream feels foreign in the morning, so it was given a foreign sender.

Inside the course

20 parts

What everyone before Freud thought a dream wasFree above
Sleep, memory and stimulus: the questions the old books left open
The method: how to take a dream apart
Irma's injection — Freud analyses his own dream in public
«A dream is the fulfilment of a wish», the whole claim
Children's dreams: the wish in plain sight
Distortion: why the wish arrives in costume
The dreams that seem to refute the theory — and don't
The day's residues, and where dream material comes from
Infantile sources: the childhood inside every dream
Dreams of falling, flying, nakedness and exams
Dreams of the death of loved ones, and the Oedipus dream
The dream-work: condensation
Displacement, and the means of representation
Symbols: what a dream may stand for, and the limits of the dictionary
Absurd dreams, and dreams of the dead
Secondary elaboration: the dream tidies itself up
Forgetting dreams, and the psychology of the dream processes
The censor at the door between two systems; regression, thinking in pictures again
The unconscious — and what your dreams finally admit about you

Questions

Is The Interpretation of Dreams free to read in Astra Trainer?

Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.

What is the short course?

20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.

Where do I get the app?

Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The Interpretation of Dreams is waiting in the app’s library.