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Over the years, I have written about unique features of the manifest content of certain dreams and what the function of such manifest inclusions might be (Mahon 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2007, 2012). Some of the features within dreams that I have previously considered are: parapraxes, puns, the uncanny, and jokes, as well as dreams within dreams. In each of those instances, I showed that such flourishes in the manifest portion of a dream represent an extra effort, so to speak, on the dream work's behalf to keep the dreamer's and the awakener's focus on the manifest facade—the better to disguise latent dream thoughts that threaten to destroy the frame of the dream by erupting into consciousness, thereby upending one of the dream's primary functions of keeping the dreamer asleep. For instance, whereas Freud suggested that jokes in dreams are never actually funny, I brought attention to a joke in a dream that was well constructed and was a good example of successful joke construction in its own right (Mahon 2002b). I then suggested that the manifest joke was an attempt to keep the anything-but-funny latent content from being detected.
In this paper, I want to focus on a particular dream's elaborate trick that the dream work conceived and put on display in manifest content, the better to conceal the latent mischief from scrutiny altogether. Let me describe the dream.