Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/489

 incident—situation, person, place, or thing—met with by the dreamer at some time not twenty-four hours before the dream took place.)

We get our clue to the dream as being a wish fulfilment by taking the dreams of children. Their dreams are as uncensored as is their conversation. Before Christmas my own children dreamed nightly that they had received the things they wanted for Christmas. The dreams were clear, logical and open wishes. Why should the dreams of adults be less logical and less open unless they are to act as concealers of the wish? If the dream processes in the child run in an orderly and logical way, would it indeed not be curious to find the dream processes of the adult less logical and full of meaning?

This argument gives us good a priori grounds for supposing that the dreams of adults too are full of meaning and are logical; that there is a wish in every dream and that the wish is fulfilled in the dream. The reason dreams appear illogical is due to the fact that if the wish were to be expressed in its logical form it would not square with our every-day habits of thought and action. We should be disinclined to admit even to ourselves that we have such dreams. Immediately upon waking only so much of the dream is remembered, that is, put into ordinary speech, as will square with our life at the time. The dream is "censored," in other words.

The question immediately arises who is the censor or what part of us does the censoring? The Freudians have made more or less of a "metaphysical entity" out of the censor. They suppose that when wishes are repressed they are repressed into the "unconscious," and that this mysterious censor stands at the trapdoor lying between the conscious and the unconscious. Many of us do not believe in a world of the unconscious (a few of us even have grave doubts about the usefulness of the term consciousness), hence we try to explain censorship along ordinary biological lines. We believe that one group of habits can "down" another group of habits—or instincts. In this case our ordinary system of habits—those which we call expressive of our "real selves"—inhibit or quench (keep inactive or partially inactive) those habits and instinctive tendencies which belong largely in the past.

This conception of the dream as having both censored and uncensored features has led us to divide the dream into its specious or manifest content (face value, which is usually nonsensical) and its latent or logical content. We should say that while the manifest content of the dream is nonsensical, its true or latent content is usually logical and expressive of some wish that has been suppressed in the waking state.

On examination the manifest content of dreams is found to be full of symbols. As long as the dream does not have to be put into customary language, it is allowed to stand as it is dreamed—the sym-