subconscious it says: I wish that mother would die. We are aware that a
certain part of the subconscious possesses everything which we can no longer
remember consciously, and especially an entirely thoughtless, childish wish.
One can confidently say that most of what arises from the subconscious has
an infantile character, as does this so simple sounding wish: "Tell me,
father, if mother died would you marry me?" The infantile expression of a
wish is the predecessor of a recent wish for marriage, which in this case we
discover is painful to the dreamer. This thought, the seriousness of the
included meaning is, as we say, "repressed into the subconscious" and can
there necessarily express itself only awkwardly and childishly, because the
subconscious limits the material at its disposal, preferably, to memories of
childhood and, as recent researches of the Zurich school have shown, to
"Memories of the race," stretching far beyond the limits of the individual.

It is not the place here to explain by examples the territory of
dream-analysis so extraordinary composed; we must be satisfied with the
results of the study; dreams are a symbolical compensation for a personally
important wish of the daytime, one which had had too little attention (or
which had been repressed).

As a result of the dominant morals, wishes which are not sufficiently
noticed by our waking consciousness and which attempt to realize themselves
symbolically in the dream are as a rule of an erotic nature. Therefore it is
advisable not to tell individual dreams in the presence of the initiated,
because dream symbolism is transparent to one acquainted with its
fundamental rules. Therefore we have always to conquer in ourselves a
certain resistance before we seriously can be fitted for the task of
unraveling the symbolical composition by patient work. When we finally
comprehend the true meaning of a dream then we at once find ourselves
transposed into the very midst of the secrets of the dreamer and to our