Freud opens with an explanation for the purpose of this book; it is designed to make dream analysis as a manifestation of the unconscious accessible to members of the general public who are otherwise unable to understand the methods of analysis because of the technical jargon and intellectual complexity of previous volumes on the topic. He describes the connection between the unconscious and the dream. For his methods, Freud prefers to assume that all dream ideas are representations of the state of the unconscious.
To begin the instruction, Freud outlines the components of a dream for further analysis. First, dreams contain both manifest content -- details remembered by the awakened dreamer -- and latent content -- aspects of the dream which reflect secret's of the unconscious such as repression. Freud uses free association, the process of having a patient speak rapidly and without correction about their stream of consciousness in response to a particular dream, in order to help a patient analyze his or her own dreams. This method supposedly reduces a person's natural impulse to disassociate or hide certain ideas of the unconscious.
Freud breaks a dream into four components: condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary revision. Each of these components refers to an act of the brain in substituting a dream image for a thought from the waking consciousness. Freud supplements these analyses with a length discussion of symbols. Symbols, just like their literary representations, are images, ideas, or objects which hold multiple meanings. In dreams they represent latent desires of personal significance. Freud uses examples from his own dreams and those of his patients, anonymously, to illustrate all of these ideas.
