Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/305

 already acquainted with dream disfigurement; we have traced it back to the censorship which one psychic instance in the psychic life exercises upon the other. Dream displacement is one of the chief means for achieving this disfigurement. Is fecit, cui profuit. We may assume that dream displacement is brought about by the influence of this censor, of the endopsychic repulsion. Since I consider this reference of dream disfigurement to the censor as the essence of my dream theory, I here insert the latter portion of a story "Traumen wie Wachen" from Phantasien eines Realisten, by Lynkeus, Vienna, (second edition, 1900), in which I find this chief feature of my theory reproduced:—

"Concerning a man who possesses the remarkable quality of never dreaming nonsense...."

"Your marvellous characteristic of dreaming as you wake is based upon your virtues, upon your goodness, your justice, and your love for truth; it is the moral clearness of your nature which makes everything about you intelligible."

"But if you think the matter over carefully," replied the other, "I almost believe that all people are created as I am, and that no human being ever dreams nonsense! A dream which is so distinctly remembered that it can be reproduced, which is therefore no dream of delirium, always has a meaning: why, it cannot be otherwise! For that which is in contradiction with itself can never be grouped together as a whole. The fact that time and space are often thoroughly shaken up detracts nothing from the real meaning of the dream, because neither of them has had any significance whatever for its essential contents. We often do the same thing in waking life; think of the fairy-tale, of many daring and profound phantastic creations, about which only an ignorant person would say: 'That is nonsense! For it is impossible.'"

"If it were only always possible to interpret dreams correctly, as you have just done with mine!" said the friend.

"That is certainly not an easy task, but the dreamer himself ought always to succeed in doing it with a little concentration of attention....You ask why it is generally impossible? Your dreams seem to conceal something secret, something unchaste of a peculiar and higher nature, a certain mystery in your nature which cannot easily be revealed by thought; and it is for that reason that your dreaming seems so often to be without meaning, or even to be a contradiction. But in the profoundest sense this is by no means the case; indeed it cannot be true at all, for it is always the same person, whether he is asleep or awake."

The manner in which the factors of displacement, condensation, and over-determination play into one another in the formation of the dream, which is the ruling factor and which the subordinate one, all this will be reserved as the subject of later investigations. For the present we may state, as a second condition which the elements must satisfy in order to get into the dream, that they must be withdrawn from the censor of resistance. From now on we shall take account of dream