The shark behind the sofa: the psychoanalytic theory of dreams.

In a sense, psychoanalysis began with dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in 1900, followed quickly by two books, on jokes and on the psychopathology of everyday life, in which Freud demonstrated how his new theory of the processes of the unconscious mind could be used to explain a great deal of everyone's everyday behaviour. His stress throughout was on the normality and ubiquity of activities like dreaming, forgetting things, making mistakes, telling jokes, and so on, which are rooted in the unconscious mind. We've all got one, and the way it makes us think and behave unites us with those outsiders, those others, young children, primitive peoples and the mentally ill, from whom we spend much of our lives trying to distance ourselves. I often think that much of the hostility to psychoanalysis expressed by academics and public figures stems from its anarchic, banana-skin effect on our wish to be seen as properly grown up, balanced, judicious, full of gravitas; our dreams especially can be wonderfully debunking productions. A patient comes in and tells us that they dreamt that we invited them to tea and then we hadn't got any to offer so they kindly cooked us a hamburger, or that they arrived in a consultingroom which was full of our badly-behaved children and turned into a