Dreams are the most direct access to unconscious processes available to conscious examination. During sleep, the repressive forces that keep forbidden material out of awareness are weakened but not eliminated. This partial relaxation allows unconscious wishes, conflicts, and memories to surface in disguised form. Freud called dream interpretation the royal road to the unconscious because analyzing dreams reveals the logic, content, and mechanisms of unconscious mental life more clearly than any other psychological phenomenon accessible to observation. The fundamental premise is that every dream has meaning. Dreams are not random neural noise or meaningless byproducts of sleep. They are motivated...