Dreamworkers take the position that a dream may have a variety of meanings depending on the levels (e.g. subjective, objective) that are being explored.
In fact, a dreamworker often prefaces any interpretation by saying, "if this were my dream, it might mean..." (a technique first developed by Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, and Jeremy Taylor and now widely practiced).
In this way, dreamers are not obliged to agree with what is said and may use their own judgment in deciding which comments appear valid or provide insight.
Dreamwork or dream-work can also refer to Sigmund Freud's idea that a person's forbidden and repressed desires are distorted in dreams, so they appear in disguised forms.
Freud used the term 'dreamwork' or 'dream-work' (Traumarbeit) to refer to "operations that transform the latent dream-thought into the manifest dream".
[1] Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is largely based on the importance of the unconscious mind.
In the psychodynamic perspective, the transferring of unconscious thoughts into consciousness is called dreamwork (German: Traumarbeit).
According to Carl Jung's principle of compensation, the reason that there is latent content in dreams is that the unconscious is making up for the limitations of the conscious mind.
[2] Since the conscious mind cannot be aware of all things at once, the latent content allows for these hidden away thoughts to be unlocked.
Free association is where the client describes the dream and relates as many aspects of it to their life as possible.