6 ideas
A dream is not primarily the disguised fulfilment of a wish but an attempt to resolve a conflict that was active in the dreamer's waking life, usually one stirred up by the preceding day's experience. Wish-fulfilment appears only when the dream reaches a satisfying resolution, so it is one possible outcome of the dream process rather than its driving mechanism.
When a dream finds an acceptable solution to the underlying conflict, sleep continues undisturbed. When the conflict is too intense for the dream's primitive methods to settle, anxiety breaks through and the dreamer wakes, so a nightmare marks the point where the dream's problem-solving has broken down.
The strangeness of dreams, including their symbolism, dramatisation and condensation, does not need an internal censor that disguises forbidden content. In sleep, thought regresses to earlier, infantile modes that work in concrete images rather than abstract logic, and the odd surface of the dream is how an adult conflict gets expressed in that older mental language.
Rivers interpreted his own dreams largely through reflection in the half-waking state just after waking, rather than through the element-by-element free association he associates with Freud's procedure. Working this way, he traced a dream back to a conflict from recent waking life and read the dream as an attempt to deal with it.
At Craiglockhart, officers who tried to banish their war memories during the day suffered recurring nightmares that replayed the same horrors almost literally. Their waking suppression left the conflict unresolved, so it returned each night in raw form. Their dreams became less violent once they were helped to face the memories and find some bearable meaning in them rather than push them away.
Rivers draws a comparison between dreams and nervous symptoms, treating both as the mind's attempts to adjust to a conflict rather than as disguised gratifications. The book offers this as a parallel between the two phenomena, not as a rule that therapy consists in consciously completing a dream's resolution.