smooth and beautifully polished surface. In the former case we are
spared, to some extent, the trouble of breaking down the
super-elaboration of the dream content.

All the same, it would be an error to see in the dream façade nothing
but the misunderstood and somewhat arbitrary elaboration of the dream
carried out at the instance of our psychical life. Wishes and phantasies
are not infrequently employed in the erection of this façade, which
were already fashioned in the dream thoughts; they are akin to those of
our waking life--"day-dreams," as they are very properly called. These
wishes and phantasies, which analysis discloses in our dreams at night,
often present themselves as repetitions and refashionings of the scenes
of infancy. Thus the dream façade may show us directly the true core of
the dream, distorted through admixture with other matter.

Beyond these four activities there is nothing else to be discovered in
the dream work. If we keep closely to the definition that dream work
denotes the transference of dream thoughts to dream content, we are
compelled to say that the dream work is not creative; it develops no
fancies of its own, it judges nothing, decides nothing. It does nothing
but prepare the matter for condensation and displacement, and refashions
it for dramatization, to which must be added the inconstant last-named
mechanism--that of explanatory elaboration. It is true that a good deal
is found in the dream content which might be understood as the result of
another and more intellectual performance; but analysis shows
conclusively every time that these _intellectual operations were already
present in the dream thoughts, and have only been taken over by the
dream content_. A syllogism in the dream is nothing other than the
repetition of a syllogism in the dream thoughts; it seems inoffensive if
it has been transferred to the dream without alteration; it becomes