How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts the house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. […] But obviously we can only form a proper judgment of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some way or other. (6.1.2)
One of Freud's most stunning and influential insights into dreams is that their "manifest" contents work like rebuses. If the word "rebus" is new to you, don't sweat it: we're willing to bet that you've encountered picture-puzzles like these before.
Here's an example. Picture an image of a vintage alarm clock beside an image of a big stack of bank notes. What could it possibly mean? If you follow Freud's instructions and think of syllables or words that could be represented by each of those images, you'll soon discover that this picture-puzzle represents an phrase that comes to us from none other than Ben Franklin: "Time is money." Easy peasy, right?
Quote #8
The work of condensation in dreams is seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. It is true in general that words are frequently treated in dreams as though they were things, and for that reason they are apt to be combined in just the same way as are presentations of things. Dreams of this sort offer the most amusing and curious neologisms. (6.2.47)
As one example of the way that dreams treat words as things, Freud recounts a dream in which he used the neologism (made-up word) "norekdal" to criticize a colleague's writing style. As he interpreted the dream, he realized that this word was made up of the names "Nora" and "Ekdal"—"characters in two well-known plays by Ibsen" (6.2.48). As Freud explains: "Some time before, I had read a newspaper article on Ibsen by the same author whose latest work I was criticizing in the dream" (6.2.48).
Quote #9
Where spoken sentence occur in dreams and are expressly distinguished as such from thoughts, it is an invariable rule that the words spoken in the dream are derived from spoken words remembered in the dream-material. […] A speech in a dream is often put together from various recollected speeches, the text remaining the same but being given, if possible several meanings, or one different from the original one. A spoken remark in a dream is not infrequently no more than an allusion to an occasion on which the remark in question was made. (6.2.62)
Throughout The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud demonstrates that our dreams represent language and linguistic communication to us in many different ways. Sometimes words, like images, can be "puzzles" in which multiple elements have been "condensed." At other times, phrases and remarks from our waking lives can be re-contextualized and given new meaning. Ultimately, in Freud's view, our dreams are free to shape their materials in any way they choose.