warning spirit, a comforter, a messenger of the gods. Now we join forces
with it in order to explore the subconscious, to unravel the mysteries which
it jealously guards and conceals. The dream does this with a completeness
which amazes us. Freud's exact analysis has taught that the dream as it
presents itself to us, exhibits merely a facade, which betrays nothing of
the inmost part of the house. But where, by attention to certain rules we
are able to bring the dreamer to express the sudden ideas awakened in him in
talking over the sub-division of his dream, then it very quickly appears
that the sudden ideas follow a determined direction, and are centralized
about certain subjects, possessing a personal significance and betraying a
meaning, which in the beginning would not have been suspected back of the
dream, but which stand in a very close symbolical relation, even to details,
to the dream facade. This peculiar thought-complex, in which all the threads
of the dream are united, is the looked-for conflict in a certain variation
which is determined by the circumstances. What is painful and contradictory
in the conflict is so confused here that one can speak of a
wish-fulfillment; let us, however, immediately add that the fulfilled wishes
apparently are not wishes, but are such as frequently are contradictory to
them. As an example let us use the case of a daughter who inwardly loves her
mother and dreams that the latter is dead, much to her sorrow. Dreams like
this are frequent. The contents make us think as little as possible of a
wish-fulfillment, and so one might perhaps get the idea that Freud's
assertion--that the dream presents in dramatic form a subconscious wish of
the dreamer--is unjust.

That happens because the non-initiated does not know how to differentiate
between manifest and latent (evident and hidden) dream contents. Where the
conflict worked over in the dream is unconscious, the solution, the wish
arising from it, is also unconscious. In the chosen example, the dreamer
wished to have the mother out of the way; in the language of the