"Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy"
About this Quote
The subtext is a defense of interpretation itself. If dreams were straightforward, they wouldn’t need Freud, the analyst, the method. Their apparent absurdity becomes evidence of psychic censorship at work: desire can’t appear onstage in its everyday clothes, so it shows up in costume, in puns, in grotesque mashups. “Profound” isn’t mystical depth here; it’s the pressure of something important forced to speak sideways. The crazier the disguise, the more intense the forbidden impulse underneath.
Context matters: Freud is writing in a late-19th-century culture obsessed with rationality, respectability, and the clean borders of the self. His project in The Interpretation of Dreams is to argue that the mind is not a transparent, unified narrator but a crowded apartment with locked doors. This quote is a recruitment slogan for that worldview, and a subtle provocation: what you call “crazy” may be the most honest part of you, just not in a language you’re comfortable admitting you understand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Freud, Sigmund. (2026, January 18). Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dreams-are-often-most-profound-when-they-seem-the-22507/
Chicago Style
Freud, Sigmund. "Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dreams-are-often-most-profound-when-they-seem-the-22507/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dreams-are-often-most-profound-when-they-seem-the-22507/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.






