Interpreting Dreams ranks among the most influential books of the twentieth century. Here Freud reflects on his own dreams and those of others to argue powerfully for the first time that all dreams serve simply to provide wish-fulfilment for the unconscious mind. From a child's simple sleeping fantasy to the bewildering horror of an adult nightmare, all can be understood, through analysis, to symbolize the satisfaction of the repressed desires of childhood. It is not, Freud argues, that dreams are prophetic or meaningless -but that in order to understand them we have to learn a new way of interpreting the complex symbols and tangled language of the unconscious mind.