Dream disorder. On the creativity of dreaming and its failure

Dream work is one of the significant discoveries which Freud described in h is Dream interpretation. It contains the processes of transformation of unc onscious thoughts into the manifest dream. The dream, thus, is structured l ike a neurotic symptom as a compromise between unconscious infantile wishes and defense. Contemporary psychoanalytic theories of thinking and the dist inction between explicit and implicit memory which was introduced by the ne urosciences offer a broader understanding of the process of dreaming. It ma y be seen as thinking during the sleep. Thus it becomes obvious that dream work in the sense of Freud's ideas is based on the more fundamental capacit y to dream which the author calls implicit dream work. He assumes that it r eflects the early experience of the alpha function which was described by B ion. Unsufficient development of the capacity to dream may cause dream diso rder which becomes manifest by the experience to be an individual that "doe s not dream".