Dream interpretation anxiety dreams and nightmares was the result of failures in the dream-work: rather than contradicting the "wish-fulfillment" theory, such phenomena demonstrated how the ego reacted to the awareness of repressed wishes that were too powerful and insufficiently disguised. Traumatic dreams (where the dream merely repeats the traumatic experience) were eventually admitted as exceptions to the theory. Freud famously described psychoanalytic dream-interpretation as "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind"; he was, however, capable of expressing regret and dissatisfaction at the way his ideas on the subject were misrepresented or simply not understood: On another
Psychoanalytic dream interpretation still exist. For example, the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Inc. still uses many forms of psychoanalysis, including the interpretation of dreams. For some supports, though, it is easy to become confused in all of the ideas of psychoanalysis and therefore have a hard time defending. This is part of what led to the decline of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic dream interpretation as mentioned earlier. G. William Domhoff and David Foulkes consider the idea that free association gives access to the latent content of the dream to have been invalidated by experimental psychology, concluding that the method is just arbitrary. Psychoanalytic