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All too typically, the dream has been viewed as a product, an object to be examined from a waking perspective. Thus, from the vantage point of the classical model, dreaming deviations from the waking state are typically not viewed as directly revelatory of the subjective state, but as defensive phenomena or as intricate, complex, disguised wish-fulfillments and conflicts pertaining to those wishes. Consequently, Greenson, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Fosshage, 1987a), viewed the progressive elements in Mr. M's dream that contributed to his emergence from a depressed state as solely defensive wish-fulfillments because they did not correspond with the patient's prevailing waking state of depression. Within the classical model the posited ubiquity of defensive operations in the formation of dreams and the correspondent manifest-latent content distinction has, through endless translations of dream imagery, cast upon dreams a waking bias that often precludes an in-depth understanding of the dreaming experience itself.
A reported dream is a waking memory of a mentational process that occurred during sleep. Just as Kohut (1959) more clearly formulated for us the importance of perceiving from within the patient's subjective frame of reference, we also need to understand the dream from within the dreamer's experiential frame of reference. Viewing dreaming as a mentational process positions us more empathically to appreciate the multiple functions and complexity of the dreamer's efforts. From this vantage point, I have proposed a revised psycho-analytic