Freud says that dream is the royal way to the unconscious and the language of it is different than the conscious one. First, there are images rather than words. Second the syntax is different. In other words talking about a dream is doing a translation between different languages: one of the dream, the other of the narration of the dream and third the psychoanalytical interpretation of the dream.

Penot makes a detailed analysis of how Freud thought and worked on dreams through the possible signs and rules of understanding they provide with the images, sounds, words they bring. Focusing on displacement and condensation, he describes the uniqueness of every dream and emphasizes the analyst's need to follow the analysands’ associations rather than seemingly obvious meanings. (ed.)