Roughly speaking, the classical Freudian approach is to intepret dreams in terms of wish fulfillment. The imagery of your dream comes from your experiences in the past couple of days. Even where the imagery is clearly of a childhood origin, it will be something in the past couple of days that activated those childhood memories or feelings.
So, the dream is a wish, but it has to be encoded in order to get past an internal censor. In Freudian dreamwork, decoding the dream means exploring your associations to dream images in order to piece together the secret wish that the dream then pictures fulfilled.
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