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The interpretation of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.
Freud made his “royal road” remark in the third of his 1909 lectures at Clark University, where he introduced the new science of psychoanalysis to an American audience. He found the phrase so felicitous that he included it in the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900, p. 608). The idea of a journey—a road trip, as we might say today—was very much on Freud's mind when he was writing the Dream Book in 1899. In a letter to Fliess (August 6, 1899), Freud describes his use of the journey as an orienting metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) for leading the reader through this new terrain of psychoanalysis1:
The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. First comes the dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the trees), where there is no clear view and it is easy to go astray. Then there is a cavernous defile through which I lead my readers … and then, all at once, the high ground and the open prospect and the question: “Which way do you want to go?” [1900, p. 122 n].
We followed Freud on that trip to discover that a dream expresses a repressed wish (the latent dream thoughts) in another form (manifest dream images), a change necessitated by the censorship required