In a footnote added in 1925 to The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud warns against a confusion triggered by a too literal reading of his book, according to which, the essence of a dream would be its latent content. In fact, the latent content of a dream is not its essence but a transcription of its essence: the transcription of a hallucinatory mode of thinking into a verbal mode of thinking: ‘At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the condition of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming’ (Freud, 1900, p. 506, fn. 2). What characterises the dream is the reactivation of a primal mode of thinking that pre-existed the verbal mode of thinking allowing the dream-work to be described as a temporal regression.
In a way, the rituals that one follows before going to sleep constitute the beginning of the dream-work as they stage a regressive movement towards infantile existence. Freud describes how this staging of the body – to get undressed, to take off ‘spectacles, false hair and teeth’, to ‘resume the foetal posture’ – leads to an ‘undressing’ of the mind: it ‘lays aside most of ’ the ‘psychical acquisitions’ and thus, sleeping, one can ‘approach remarkably close to the situation in which (…) life began’ (Freud, 1917 [1915a], p. 222). Similar to the way that the dream-work creates forms that pre-exist the use of words: ‘thoughts are transformed into images, mainly of a visual sort; that is to say, word-presentations are taken back to the thing-presentations which correspond to them’ (ibid., p. 228). The dream-work operates a formal regression of verbal language ‘where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones’ (Freud, 1900, p. 548): word-presentations of the preconscious system are taken back to thing-presentations of the unconscious system. Freud described the primal form created by the dream-work as a primitive form of writing: ‘the dream-work makes a translation of the dream- thoughts into a primitive mode of expression similar to picture-writing’ (Freud, 1916–1917 [1915–1917], p. 229).