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While the nucleus of many of his later ideas about the defenses and the superego can be found in the various editions of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud never formally recast his conceptualizations about dream interpretation and the dynamic unconscious into structural theory. Consequently, his fundamental ideas about the role of unconscious fantasies in dreams were left in their original scaffolding. This has left us with considerable conceptual ambiguity.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud described preexisting formations of psychical material in the latent dream thoughts which he called “fantasies.” Fantasies are analogous to daydreams in waking life, he explained; they are psychical facades constructed in order to bar the way to certain memories (p. 491). He emphasized that it is right for us to call daytime fantasie “daydreams,” because of the number of properties they share with night dreams. Night dreams occur during sleep when a current, unacceptable wish in the preconscious resonates with an earlier, unacceptable wish from childhood. Fantasies, like dreams, are wish-fulfillments. They are based on impressions of infantile experience, and they benefit from a certain degree of relaxation of the censorship (p. 492).
Freud hypothesized the following ideas about the role of unconscious fantasies in dreams: In the shaping of our dreams, the dream work will often prefer to take possession of a ready-made daydream and will seek to introduce it into the content of the dream. During dream construction, the secondary revision may borrow a ready-made fantasy to help create a coherent facade; such fantasies appear in the manifest content of the dream largely unaltered. Sometimes dreams