Why dreams come out strange

1. Freud argued that a dream is a wish in disguise, usually a wish you could not admit to while awake.
2. The disguise protects your sleep, because meeting the wish head on would be disturbing enough to wake you.
3. This is a psychological explanation, which means it treats a dream as carrying personal meaning rather than as a by-product of the brain.

Manifest content

1. The manifest content is the dream exactly as you remember it on waking.
2. It is the images, the people, the places and the events, the part you could describe to a friend at breakfast.
3. For Freud this surface is the finished disguise, so it is the least important layer even though it is the only one you see.

Latent content

1. The latent content is the real meaning underneath, the wish or fear the dream is actually about.
2. It comes from the unconscious, the part of the mind you cannot reach by simply thinking about it.
3. It is never handed over directly, which is why Freud thought a dream needed interpreting rather than just reading.

Dreamwork, the process that does the disguising

1. Dreamwork is the name for the processes that turn latent content into manifest content.
2. Freud described three ways it does this.
3. Condensation
   1. Several people, places or meanings are squeezed into a single dream image, so no one of them can be picked out.
   2. A dream figure with your head of year's voice and your gran's face is condensation at work.
4. Displacement
   1. A feeling is moved off its real target and onto something safer, so the emotion survives but the target changes.
   2. Being furious with a bus driver in a dream when the anger really belongs to a friend is displacement.
5. Secondary elaboration
   1. Gaps are filled in and the jumps smoothed over, often as you wake, so the dream comes out as a story that almost hangs together.

Strengths of the theory

1. A strength is that it was the first serious attempt to treat dreams as meaningful rather than as nonsense, and it opened up a whole way of working with patients.
2. A second strength is that it explains something other accounts leave hanging, namely why dreams are so odd, because the oddness is the disguise itself.

Weaknesses of the theory

1. A weakness is that it is subjective, because the latent content is whatever the interpreter decides it is, and two people can read the same dream completely differently.
2. A second weakness is that it cannot be tested, because a hidden wish can never be observed, so there is no result that would show the theory to be wrong.

Turning this into marks

1. Give manifest content, latent content and dreamwork as three separate ideas.
2. When a dream is described, label the manifest detail, name the dreamwork process and say what latent meaning it could be hiding.
3. The mark most often lost is describing the theory without ever weighing it.