Jacques Derrida proposed to understand this primitive writing of the dream as ‘a landscape of writing. Not a writing which simply transcribes, a stony echo of muted words, but a lithography before words: metaphonetic, nonlinguistic, alogical’ (Derrida, 1978 [1967], p. 259). Through the dream-work, words are transformed into the primal writing of thing- presentations and so verbal language is trapped by this operation, which removes the coding function from words: ‘for a dream all operations with words are no more than a preparation for a regression to things’ (Freud, 1917 [1915a], p. 229). Derrida very elegantly reformulated Freud’s idea when he described the dream ‘as a displacement similar to an original form of writing which puts words on stage without becoming subservient to them’ (Derrida, 1978 [1967], p. 262). The dream is a form of thinking that is not subordinated to an established code, hence the impossibility of conceiving a systematic dictionary of dreams. As ‘with Chinese script, the correct interpretation’ of the dream script ‘can only be arrived at on each occasion from the context’ (Freud, 1900, p. 353).
When it reaches the perceptual apparatus, the material of the dream is edited by the last function of the dream-work: secondary revision. Secondary revision introduces the coherence of a narration into the apparent disconnectedness of the psychical writing. Unlike the other factors of the dream-work, secondary revision is a psychical function operated by the activity of the preconscious and so is not restricted to the dream-work. It plays its part with every perceptual signal that reaches consciousness:
Our waking (preconscious) thinking behaves towards any perceptual material with which it meets in just the same way in which [secondary revision] behaves towards the content of dreams. It is the nature of our waking thought to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it.
(Freud, 1900, p. 499)