The author suggests that dreams are an expressive means through which the psychic apparatus delineates, construes and communicates an issue it is faced with. It is shown that there are substantial differences between this approach and more classical understandings of the nature and function of dreaming. Instead of laying emphasis on dream work as a defense system or as outlets of unconscious drives, the author highlights two further aspects of dreaming: (1) That in and through dreaming the psychic apparatus has developed a specific capacity to identify and express questions, problems and emotional experiences with which it is confronted, in a complex spiral and vertiginous way as described in the paper; (2) That dreams encapsulate kernels of experience into “engrams” by constantly searching for ways of addressing and readdressing emotional experience.

To scrutinize his theoretical suggestion, the author relies on the tradition of self-analysis, submitting a personal dream to psychoanalytic interpretation, which is done through two approaches: a more “classical” approach and one that aims to test the author's thesis. One and the same dream is viewed under two distinct lights that illuminate it in different albeit complementary ways, resulting in different conceptions of dream work.