The purpose of this paper is a reexamination of the concept of the manifest dream. First, the major tenets of Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent content will be reviewed, together with his recommendations for dream interpretation which follow from that distinction. Second, I will attempt to identify problematic philosophical assumptions which appear to be inherent in both the clinical theory and the metapsychology of the manifest dream. Next, I will highlight examples from Freud’s writing which suggest that Freud himself remained ambivalent about the degree of significance which should legitimately be accorded the manifest content of dreams. Finally, I will suggest an alternative theoretical framework for approaching the manifest dream, and manifest content in general, utilizing the concept of the representational world as the basic organizing construct.