Freud and dreams: what The Interpretation of Dreams says

Freud reads the dream as a disguised wish, found by starting from your own associations rather than from a dream key.

Wish
Association
Unconscious

The essentials

Freud and dreams at a glance

For you, the most useful contribution remains his approach: let each image recall a memory, a thought, a desire.

Free tool: Interpret my dream
Also read: Jung and dreams

A book that changes how we see dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in November 1899, dated 1900 by its Viennese publisher. In it Freud defends an idea that was new at the time: the dream has a meaning, specific to the dreamer, and it can be found. He would later make it the “royal road” to knowledge of the unconscious, in a phrase added in 1909. The book relies heavily on his own dreams, which he analyzes without false modesty.

Wish, disguise, and dream work

Freud holds the dream to be the fulfillment of a wish, but under a mask. He distinguishes the manifest content, the story you remember, from the latent content, the thoughts it covers. Between the two operates the “dream work”: condensation, which fuses several people or ideas into a single image, and displacement, which shifts the emotion onto a secondary detail. Hence those dreams where the essential seems to hide in a corner of the scene.

Associations before symbols

Freud rejects dream dictionaries that translate each image once and for all. His method starts from the person’s associations, element by element. He admits fixed symbols, often sexual, only for images on which the person associates nothing, and he presents them with caution. The dictionary pages report these readings as a moment in the history of ideas, without raising them to truth.

Facts and sources

The Interpretation of Dreams came out in November 1899, dated 1900 by the publisher Deuticke. S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Leipzig and Vienna, F. Deuticke, 1900 [1899]; Wikipedia (fr), “L’Interprétation du rêve”
For Freud, a dream is the disguised fulfillment of a wish; the “dream-work” (condensation, displacement) turns the latent content into the manifest content. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, ch. III, IV, and VI
Freud called the interpretation of dreams the “royal road” to knowledge of the unconscious. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ch. VII (sentence added in the 1909 edition)
He resorts to fixed symbols only for images about which the person has no association. S. Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1916–1917), lecture 10

A dream is read as a mirror of what you are living, never as an omen: no reading here predicts anything at all.

Freud and dreams: your questions

For Freud, are all dreams sexual?

No. Freud sees in the dream the fulfillment of a wish, which is not always sexual: hunger, ambition, revenge, the need for rest. He gives sexual symbols a large place, but only when the person has no personal association with an image.

Are Freud’s ideas about dreams still accepted?

In part. The idea that dreams pick up our concerns is well supported by research; that of a hidden wish behind every dream much less so. His method of association remains, however, a rich way of thinking about your own dreams.