Dream interpretation century the English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne wrote a short tract upon the interpretation of dreams. Dream interpretation was taken up as part of psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century; the perceived, "manifest" content of a dream is analyzed to reveal its "latent" meaning to the psyche of the dreamer. One of the seminal works on the subject is "The Interpretation of Dreams" by Sigmund Freud. A paper in 2009 by Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton in the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology" found that most people believe that "their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths."
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