THE DREAM-WORKThe Structure of Dreams as posed

by Freud

What is the Dream-Work As described by Freud: “All other previous attempts to solve the

problems of dreams have concerned themselves directly with the manifest dream-content as it is retained in the memory…for us a new psychic material interposes itself between the dream-content and the results of your investigations: the latent dream-content, or dream-thoughts…We develop the solution of the dream from this latent content, and not from the manifest content.”

And this means…? Manifest content

What we remember from our dreams

i.e. I dream that there is a chicken running through my house. The manifest content is that there is a chicken in my house.

Latent content What the symbolic, hidden (or

“latent”) meaning is of our dreams.

i.e. I dream that there is a chicken running through my house. The latent content is that the idiot my brother is letting stay with us for 3 days is loose in my house…

How about you? Look back at the dream you described for

your warm-up. Pair up 2 minutes each:

Describe the manifest content Start guessing at what the latent content

might be

More from the Mouth of Freud

“We develop the solution of the dream from this latent content, and not from the manifest content.”

“The dream-content appears to us as a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose symbols and laws of composition we must learn by comparing the origin with the translation.”

Translation…? We can only understand what a

dream means through the latent-content, NOT the manifest-content.

The manifest-content is the translation of the latent content into a form we can understand. Think a Navajo-English

dictionary: It takes the language we do not

understand (Navajo) and provides us with the English word for the Navajo one so the word is comprehensible to us.

What do we do with this? Our job, then, is to do

the opposite of what our dreams have done.

Instead of sculpting the latent-content into manifest-content (as our dreams do)…

We dig out the latent-content from the manifest content. (And dig DEEP)

What does this Accomplish?

From the latent-content, we can find our “dream-wish.” Basically our (dark) suppressed desires.

Or (perhaps) desire to be rid of a darkness? These desires are distorted through the way

they are represented in the manifest-content. Our job to pull the latent-content out of the

manifest-content and discover the dream-wish.

What is at the center of the dream? The Desire that fuels the Fantasy of the

Dream

Formula Manifest = what we are presented with Latent =All of the possible hidden

meanings of what we are presented with Dream-Wish =underlying desire fueling

the latent content More Clarity? Image = Babushka Doll

Taking Apart the Dreamwork Practice time!!

Look back at the dream you wrote about for warm-up

Identify: The Manifest Content At least 2 layers of latent content And the dream-wish

Now, the nagging question…

How does this relate to Cyberpunk???

Backtrack From the Cyberpunk Powerpoint: What does Cyberpunk do?

It “distorts our sense of who or where we are, of what is “real” at all, and what is most valuable about human life.” Challenges everything we know to be real,

normal, natural.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjgE8Lw5YaQ