‘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 symbolise its present emotional conflicts in order to re-orient itself toward ‘the real world — meaning external and internal reality’.