SOURCE: “Dreams of Authority and the Authority of Dreams,” in Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 17–69.

In the following excerpt, Thomas provides a Freudian interpretation of A Christmas Carol.

A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke.

—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The fundamental claim Freud would make about the origin of dreams is that they are expressions by the dreamer of a wish. The wish may be repressed and hence not immediately recognizable as a wish, and its expression may be disguised for a number of important reasons. But the dream is nevertheless an expression of the dreamer's desires. One of Freud's achievements was to establish the dream as a disguised wish and then to shift the center of the discussion...