Secondary revision aims to introduce a waking, conscious form of thinking, into the dream’s script: ‘It moulds the material offered to it into something like a day-dream’ (ibid., p.492).9 Secondary revision displays a less primitive form of thinking than the other factors of the dream-work: it rearranges infantile wishes through a verbal mode of thinking. In other words, a psychical writing without a systematised code, that cannot be read through a dictionary, is organised into an orderly sequence of signs. Secondary revision brings back the picture writing of the dream towards the verbal images of narration. It is this factor of the dream-work which aims to transform the psychical writing of the dream into the speech of the day-dream.
In the psychical writing of dreams it is not so much that words have lost their meaning but rather that meaning has lost the use of words. Instead of verbal signs, meaning is expressed through a primitive picture-writing. A psychoanalytic approach to dreams shows how a hallucinatory mode of thinking through sensitive images pre-exists a verbal mode of thinking and as pointed out by the psychoanalyst José Renato Avzaradel: ‘the psychoanalytic process when directed toward developing the capacity to think finds a consistent basis in dreams for understanding the connections between image-rich dream language and thoughts’ (Avzaradel, 2011, p. 833).10