The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)

The first dream Sigmund Freud takes apart in these pages is one of his own, a patient's throat examined, an illness that might be his doing, a guilt he refuses to simply sleep off. He dismantles it syllable by syllable, until the dread resolves into a wish too shameful to admit while awake. This is the book's gambit: a dream is never nonsense but a coded letter from the part of us that wants what it must not, smuggled past the inner censor by a dreamwork that condenses and displaces until the desire is unrecognizable even to the dreamer. To prove it, Freud offers the strangest evidence any science ever ran on, his own sleep, his ambitions and rivalries and small humiliations laid open as specimens. Here, reading Sophocles, Freud first lays out the desire he will later call the Oedipus complex, and hands the next century its language for the hidden self. The dream, he writes, is the royal road. Walk it once and you will not look at your own mind the same way again.