"Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation."
Freud's primary concern in his psychiatric practice is the elimination of repression. Repression is the brain's response to "unpleasant" ideas or feelings. The brain will pretend the don't exist, only reminding the person of such thoughts through symbols in dreams. Freud finds an easy path to the uncovering of repressed thoughts through dream analysis.
"If we avail ourselves for a moment longer of the right to elaborate from the dream interpretation such far-reaching psychological speculations, we are duty bound to demonstrate that we are thereby bringing the dream into a relationship which may also comprise other psychic structures."
Freud demonstrates an interest in reincorporating dream imagery in his patient's lives. He performs dream analysis in order to teach patients about their unconsciouses. He desires for them to be able to consequently perform their own analyses and to make their dreams into an advantage when it comes to the development of the self.
"If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends."
In the analysis of nightmares, Freud prefers to be logical rather than sympathetic. He encourages readers to identify the specific fear which the dream induces. This fear is probably a manifestation of some form of repression which is as unrealistic as a phobia, baseless.
". . .The dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought."
Freud opens his book by describing exactly what mental functions a dream performs for its dreamer. The dream continues the work of the waking mind, but it will manifest complex thoughts or feelings through innocuous or seemingly incoherent circumstances completely detached from the reality of waking thought. Thus dreams are a sort of figurative continuance of active thought.
