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It is somewhat awkward to admit that, although i have spent a reasonable amount of my career involved in dream research (Ellman and Antrobus, 1991), I have never written a clinical paper on dreams. This undoubtedly has to do with a conflict that is a constant background presence in my clinical work—whether I am interested in the dream or the dreamer. In other words, is my interest in dreams moving the patient to dream in particular ways to satisfy the demand characteristics of my analytic stance? Of course, Freud faced this question when he hypothesized that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. Subsequent clinical experience led him to realize that royal roads were rapidly proving to be dead ends in Europe and in psychoanalysis. It was his intellectual discovery of the importance of transference (and, implicitly, countertransference) that influenced him to abandon his reliance on dream interpretation and state that, although he did not doubt the importance of the dream, he realized that to rely fully on dream interpretation will put a clinician “into conflict with the most immediate aims of the treatment” (Freud, 1911, quoted in Ellman, 1991, p. 110.
In this brief theoretical statement, I feel I have to separate to some extent my views on the function of the dream and how the dream is