To assert that people often dream of what they desire might have been uncontroversial, but Freud saw such straightforward representation of wish-fulfilment as relatively uninteresting, and most typical of child psychology, where conflict was not yet in evidence. It was precisely the unintelligible features of dreams, the logical impossibilities and bizarre happenings, that he set out to explain, and came to see as resulting from an unstable compromise between desire and prohibition. Like Plato, he saw mental life as a struggle between 'the beast' in man and some higher moderating influence' but whereas Plato's nocturnal beast was rampant, not shrinking in fantasy 'from intercourse with a mother or anyone else, man, god or brute', Freud's (almost) always appeared in disguise, covered in guile, a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, 'Freud very commonly gives what we might call a sexual interpretation. But it is interesting that among all the reports of dreams which he gives there is not a single example of a straightforward sexual dream. Yet these dreams are as common as rain.' Taking into account the social impropriety (which Freud explicitly denies), he had strong theoretical reasons for preferring to concentrate on the indirect methods of expression which he attributed to dreams. Just as he had previously seen hysterical symptoms as a body-language or somatic metaphor reflecting underlying conflict, a product of suppressed emotion and inhibited desire, Freud now saw dreams as symptom-equivalents, susceptible to the same mode of deconstruction. He processed to transpose the method of 'free-association' developed in the treatment of hysterical patients to the content analysis of his own dreams. The nub of the method consisted of inducing in himself a twilight state analogous to hypnotic trance by deliberately relinquishing the conscious organisation and editorship of ideas. If the mish-mash of thoughts that surfaced in this open-minded state was not consciously organised, Freud reasoned, then any pattern it revealed must be a reflection of the unconscious mind. And this functioned according to the 'pleasure principle', knowing only wishes whose fulfilment admitted of no contradiction and was unbound by logic or time. If he jumped off from a particular element in a dream, he could trace a series of thoughts which revealed hitherto unknown wishes. A concealed narrative or 'latent content' could then be inferred, which were thoughts underlying the 'manifest content' of the dream. The 'latent content' was concealed because it was invariably unacceptable to the conscious mind which (in its 'normal' self-critical state) functioned according to the 'reality principle'. The 'manifest content', on the other hand, might appear as 'hieroglyphics', but this was a mere disguise for the undesirable latent dream thoughts. Even so some attempt to iron it into coherence by a process of 'secondary revision' was made rather as a person with memory loss might invent plausible stories to fill in gaps. Freud's virtuosity in tracing the associative links to his dream is breathtaking. The dream, as he says, is 'meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream thoughts.' For example, in his brief dream of the 'botanical monograph' which occurred the evening after an interrupted conversation with a medical colleague, Dr Konigstein, this is how he unpacks the single word 'botanical': To botanical belong the recollections of the person of Professor Gartner (German: Gartner = gardener), of his blooming wife, of my patient, whose name is Flora, and of a lady concerning whom I told the story of the forgotten flowers. Gartner again leads me to the laboratory and the conversation with Konigstein, and the allusion to the two female patients belongs to the same conversation. From the lady with the flowers a train of thought branches leads to the title of the hastily seen monograph. Further, botanical recalls an episode at the 'Gymnasium', and a university examination; and a fresh subject - that of my hobbies - which was broached in the above-mentioned conversation, is linked up, by means of what is humorously called my favourite flower, the artichoke, with the train of thought proceeding from the forgotten flowers; behind 'artichoke' there lies, on the one hand, a recollection of Italy, and on the other a reminiscence of a scene in my childhood in which I first formed an acquaintance - which has since then grown so intimate - with books. Botanical, then, is a veritable nucleus, and, for the dream, the meeting-point of many trains of thought; which I can testify, had all really been brought into connection by the conversation referred to. To be continued...