This paper addresses a puzzle in The Interpretation of Dreams. In Chapter VI Freud concludes that the dream work is completely different from waking thought, but there is very little that warrants this conclusion; rather, almost everything suggests the opposite. This paper argues that this contradiction is a result of the tension between two different ways of approaching the problem of dreams - one epistemological, the other anthropological. In each case, it is Kant's philosophy that provides the clue. On the one hand, Freud sets up the problem of the relation between dream and waking thought in Kant's epistemological terms, which leads to the idea that they are each wholly different psychical processes. On the other hand, the opposite tendency of Freud's thought, in which factors in the dream work are demonstrated at work in waking thought too, has more in common with Kant's anthropological writings on dreams, fantasy and madness. The paper thus argues that the epistemological and the anthropological approaches lead to different conceptions of the nature and outcome of The Interpretation of Dreams, and suggests how the book can be understood as a kind of philosophical anthropology at the same time as a specifically psychoanalytic endeavour.