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WHEN FREUD VIEWED DREAMS as “the royal road to the unconscious,” he inestimably prized dreams as the primary avenue to the unconscious. He envisioned the unconscious to be a wellspring of instinctual energies pressing for discharge and a container of fantasies and memories banned from consciousness. The dynamic unconscious provided an explanation for the pervasive irrationality in human beings and was considered by Freud to be one of the three great scientific discoveries (the others by Copernicus and Darwin) that dethroned human beings from their exalted status.
It has been close to a century since Freud published his monumental work on dreams, a work about which Freud stated, “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime” (Jones, 1953, p. 350). Remarkably, the classical model of dream formation and interpretation has remained relatively unchanged (Curtis & Sachs, 1976). The further application of the structural model (Freud, 1923; Arlow & Brenner, 1964) has emphasized the participation of all three psychic agencies, that is, the id, ego, and superego, in dream formation; yet, the primary impetus for the dream remains the wish that represents an instinctual drive, infantile in origin and seeking gratification throughout one’s life (Altman, 1969). Additional distinguishing features of the classical model are that defenses (or disguises) are ubiquitous in the formation of dreams, resulting in a manifest-latent content distinction, and that dreams are intrinsically regressed products (Arlow & Brenner, 1964; Blanck & Blanck, 1974), that is, they involve primitive modes of functioning and exclude, by and