How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include several wish-fulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish fulfilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest childhood. (5.3.49)
For Freud, dreams speak a language of their own, and it's the job of the psychoanalyst to interpret that language. With this in mind, he insists that it's crucial to remember that the true meaning of a dream is rarely on the surface. Instead, the dream's deeper meaning must be sought under layers of other—more obvious—ideas and associations.
Quote #5
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. (6.1.2)
When Freud speaks of "dream-thoughts," he means the "latent" content of dreams—that is, the meaning that lies below the surface. When he speaks of "dream-content," he means the "manifest" content of dreams—that is, the images and events that appear to us on the surface.
Quote #6
The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error. (6.1.2)
By using pictographic script (think of ancient hieroglyphs) as an analogy for the "language" of dream content, Freud suggests that the various pieces of our dreams can't be interpreted individually. Instead, meaning comes from the relations that all of the pieces share with one another. The meaning of each is determined in relation to the whole, just as words take on specific meaning in the context of the sentences in which they appear.