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In The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung), first printed on 4 November 1899 (Masson 1985, p. 381), Freud reproduces one of his own dreams as the model or specimen dream [Traummuster] to ‘demonstrate upon it [his] method of interpretation’ (Freud 1900, p. 105). He titled it ‘Dream of July 23rd-24th, 1895’ (Freud 1900, p. 107), although it is now generally known as the dream of Irma's injection (the Irma dream). The text of the Irma dream together with the text of its analysis served Freud as the template for his theory ‘that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish’ (Freud 1900, p. 121) and both texts (the Text) are still widely considered to be ‘the cornerstone for [Freud's] dream theory’ (Van Velzen 1984, p. 245). Despite its canonical status many commentators, from the very beginning, have found Freud's Text ‘inadequate’ (McGuire 1974, p. 393, see also Greenberg & Pearlman 1978; Wax 1996) and there have been many and varied attempts to re-interpret it (i.e. Erikson 1992), clarify its wider dynamics (i.e. Schur 1979), add to its biographical details (i.e. Hartman 1983), subject it to ‘formalist’ (i.e. Mahony 1987, p. 107) or ‘structural analysis’ (Kuper & Stone 1982), psychoanalyse it (i.e. Mautner 1991), or seek to disclose its repressed sexual meanings (i.e. Mehlman 1976; Anspaugh 1995; Salyard 1992). Rather than add to this already extensive literature—the ‘favourite blood sport amongst Freudians’ (Appignanesi & Forrester 1992, p. 124)-I want to interrogate Freud's ‘biographeme’ (Burke 1998, p. 37), his autobiographical account of how he came to discover the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams. Questioning Freud's single teleological plot, subsequently reproduced uncritically through Jones (1954, p. 388) and Strachey (1958, pp. xiv-xv), destabilizes a number of those fundamental assumptions which still subtly and surreptitiously determine how that ‘exemplary dream’ of psychoanalysis (Wax 1996, p. 300) is to be read.