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One of the pillars of Freud's thought was surely his view of dreams (Freud 1911, 1916-17). Dreams as the royal road to the unconscious and as the guardian of sleep are among the most widely shared concepts in psychoanalytic thought. Yet the approach to the interpretation of dreams has changed greatly, so that many — for example, Meltzer, in Dream Life (1984) — regard them no longer as puzzles to be decrypted, but instead as entities with which to enter into resonance so as to see what they arouse in us.
Whereas, in the classical approach to working with dreams, free associations allowed the operations responsible for producing a dream (displacement, condensation, symbolization, etc.) to be retraced in the reverse direction, nowadays many would emphasize certain characteristics that dreams have in effect taken on day by day in the course of our daily work.
(a) Particular stress is laid on the transformational value of dreams, which are read as if by intuition, a great deal of space being assigned also to the manifest content.
Giulia's analysis, for example, was characterized by a succession of versions of the same dream, which gradually came to be modified in accordance with the changes occurring in her analysis. First, she dreams of going into the snake house at a zoo, where she is terrified by the snakes