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SIDNEY PULVER INTRODUCED THE PANEL BY POINTING TO conflicting attitudes about the use of the manifest dream in clinical work which have existed side by side in psychoanalysis since Freud's time. On the one hand, Freud called the manifest dream the "royal road to the unconscious" and spoke of certain dream symbols directly revealing unconscious meanings. On the other hand, Freud cautioned that in most cases we cannot determine the significance of the dream from its manifest content alone, but must obtain the dreamer's associations.
Following initial interest in the manifest dream on the part of Freud and his early colleagues, there set in a depreciatory attitude toward the manifest dream, punctuated by occasional studies like those of Sharpe and Erikson.
Connected to this controversy about the clinical use of the manifest dream is a controversy about the definition of terms: What is the manifest dream, as distinct from the dream report, the dream experience, and secondary revision? Sleep laboratory researchers tend to have a different view of proper usage than psychoanalytic clinicians.
A. Scott Dowling's presentation addressed itself to the form of the manifest dream. Form can be divided into dream morphology, the regular structure of individual dream elements, and dream syntax, the regular arrangement of dream elements vis-à-vis one another. In contrast to dream form is the semantics of the dream, which consists of the meanings attached to the content of dream elements, to be deciphered by free association.