Abstract

The belief that obscure dreams have meaning, that they can be understood in spite of their seeming incoherence, is shared by most cultures: the importance attributed to the interpretation of dreams comes up several times in such sacred texts as the Bible and Talmud, where it is warned that an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter. However, even if such a point of view may justify the interpretation of obscure dreams, it does not provide a basis for a systematic interpretive approach. Roger Caillois considered the will to interpretation “one of the noblest flaws of the human spirit,” defining it as “this passion to find meaning in what has none, and thus to derive meaning from the meaningless.” And it is surely the human spirit's inherent need for intelligibility that underlies the desire to account for the existence of dreams, whether as a divine message or a symptom of neurosis. The act of interpretation consists of giving meaning to something that, at first glance, appears to have none; and this is done not arbitrarily but by discerning a meaning - with the help of methods created for this purpose - that is believed to be implicitly contained in the dream. Thus to interpret a dream we must explain it in relation to the context in which it takes it meaning. For Freud “the interpretation of a dream” requires specifying its “sense” and then replacing it with something that can fit within the chain of our psychic actions.