to reveal which had better remain my secret. Why, then, do not I choose
another dream whose analysis would be more suitable for publication, so
that I could awaken a fairer conviction of the sense and cohesion of the
results disclosed by analysis? The answer is, because every dream which
I investigate leads to the same difficulties and places me under the
same need of discretion; nor should I forgo this difficulty any the
more were I to analyze the dream of some one else. That could only be
done when opportunity allowed all concealment to be dropped without
injury to those who trusted me.

The conclusion which is now forced upon me is that the dream is a _sort
of substitution_ for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought
which I attained after complete analysis. I do not yet know the process
by which the dream arose from those thoughts, but I perceive that it is
wrong to regard the dream as psychically unimportant, a purely physical
process which has arisen from the activity of isolated cortical elements
awakened out of sleep.

I must further remark that the dream is far shorter than the thoughts
which I hold it replaces; whilst analysis discovered that the dream was
provoked by an unimportant occurrence the evening before the dream.

Naturally, I would not draw such far-reaching conclusions if only one
analysis were known to me. Experience has shown me that when the
associations of any dream are honestly followed such a chain of thought
is revealed, the constituent parts of the dream reappear correctly and
sensibly linked together; the slight suspicion that this concatenation
was merely an accident of a single first observation must, therefore,
be absolutely relinquished. I regard it, therefore, as my right to
establish this new view by a proper nomenclature. I contrast the dream