"Dreams are my landscape", said Meltzer. In this book he re-establishes psychoanalysis as the art of reading dreams, and dream-life as the core of mental processes. Dreams are not just puzzles to be decoded, the effluence of past trauma or future wish-fulfilment; they are the psyche's attempt--with a varying level of aesthetic achievement--to symbolize its present emotional conflicts in order to re-orient itself toward "the real world--meaning external and internal reality".