Yet, in spite of modern science, dreams still remain mysterious. Since I make dream interpretation a key part of my psychotherapeutic work, I'll offer some comments here about this work. Freud's classic text, The Interpretation of Dreams, contains some of his finest work. I won't even try to summarize it here, but I will point out that Freud believed every dream is a wish fulfillment, and he kept this theory to the end, even though he gave up his initial idea that all dreams have a sexual content. For Freud, the concept of wish fulfillment didn't necessarily imply that a pleasure was sought, because a person could just as well have a wish to be punished.
Some persons believe that dreams have certain fixed meanings.
The Dream Text T o use dream material clinically, we need to realize that we never use the dream itself. That might sound strange, but think about it. When you tell someone about a dream, it's impossible to depict the jumble of images that you perceived while you were sleeping. All you can do is put the dream into words in an imperfect attempt to describe what you experienced. So, in the end, to talk about the dream you really talk about the text of your perception of the dream.