1. Many people before Freud were interested in dreams. Look at the pre-Freudian pages of the website.

2. It seems like a trivial question, but the answers often reveal students' ideas about what kind of enterprise psychoanalysis is. Also Freud says that dreams are 'egoistic' - it's all me, me, me - we become the hero of our own private movie. (Of course, there are also 'anxiety dreams'!)
 
 

3. Freud fully interpreted a dream at a place called 'Belle Vue', while on holiday. He wrote to his friend Fliess to say that perhaps one day there will be a plaque there commemorating the event - which there now is. There is a Belle Vue in the top left hand corner of the Alpine picture in the dining room. Unfortunately, it's the wrong Belle Vue, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story? The main thing is, he was on holiday, and it can lead to discussion about what are the conditions for allowing ideas to come into one's head, and creativity in general. What places, events, experiences, inspire the class to think?

4. There are usually two answers given to this - the last picture which shows the nurse waking up and an earlier picture showing something strange happening. These two answers can be the starting point for thinking about the differences and similarities between dreams and waking life.
 

5. Two levels here: the dream related to the subliminal stimulus (the baby crying or whatever) - you can't get rid of it so it keeps getting more and more insistant; and the dream related to the life of the dreamer - what's it like to be a governess or nurse looking after someone else's children? In both cases a relation between the 'mind' and the outside world, which should provide scope for discussion.

See Theory 8 for 'water', and 'Birth dream'
 

6. Why should a child dream that a natural function - urination - has run riot? A possible way in to think about the emotional life of children.
 

7. General discussion
 
 

8. The idea of 'represents' implies two levels, one of which is obvious ('manifest') and the other which is not so obvious ('latent'). Also it can be shown that the chair can have many meanings - as a symbol it is fluid and polysemous (these will be brought out by the various groups in discussion). If it is a 'person', then who? The mother? The father? Himself (an alter ego that he could perhaps argue with and reproduce the rivalry that he says is an important part of his emotional life - see the Non Vixit dream).  When one of the class says 'it looks like a phallus', don't be phased. We still use the term 'seminal ideas' to describe how ideas get transfered from one person to another, and metaphors of conception, procreation and birth are frequently used to describe the acquisition and growth of knowledge.

9. A composite human-bird figure, the Ba bird represents the individuality of the person in Egyptian mythology. There is also the ka which represents the life force, and the body itself. The Egyptian model of the human being reminds me of Freud's early theory of 'ego instincts' and 'sexual instincts', with the body in the middle.

This can also be used to think about 'condensation' - two elements put into one figure.
 
 

10.  Mountains,  rivers,  waterfalls,  churches,  steeples,  houses,  hills,  valleys.  It should be given an X certificate!

11. See Theory 2
 

12. Dominion over all the little people? And what more?
 

13. Well, as a Jew, Freud was not supposed to collect graven images in the first place. But what else can the class come up with?
 

14. General discussion
 

15. The dreams will presumably reveal ideas about what sort of person Freud was.
 

16. Groups could play charades instead of drawing. There will be different kinds of relation between the sentence and its visual representation, based on sound, meaning, or image, or via some intermediate association (eg. I might represent the word 'go' by drawing a traffic signal).
 

17. There will be different wishes and different levels of wish. eg. at one level we might say his wish was to 'create a museum' (in fact his collection is very much like some of the museums he visited), at a deeper level we might say he was trying to 'control the past' (just as he was trying to do in his work?), and at a deeper level still we might say he was trying to 'immortalize himself' or 'deny death' in some way (just as most of the objects themselves are trying to do, mostly found in graves and forming part of funerary rites). However, there is no one answer to this, and I have found that each group doing the exercise has different things to teach me.

As you can see there are no 'correct' answers. It is mainly about trying to free associate and see what comes up.