a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

concrete before their meaning paled, and will therefore go back to the original
concrete significance of these words as often as possible, and so you will be
glad to learn that you can represent the "possession" of an object by the
actual physical straddling of it.[32] The dream work does the same thing.
Under such circumstances you can hardly demand accuracy of representation.
You will also have to allow the dream-work to replace an element that is as
hard to depict as for instance, broken faith, by another kind of rupture, a
broken leg.[33] In this way you will be able to smooth away to some extent
the crudity of imagery when the latter is endeavoring to replace word
expression.
In the representation of parts of speech that denote thought relations, such
as because, therefore, but, etc., you have no such aids; these constituent
parts of the text will therefore be lost in your translation into images. In the
same way, the dream-work resolves the content of the dream thought into its
raw material of objects and activities. You may be satisfied if the possibility is
vouchsafed you to suggest certain relations, not representable in themselves,
in a more detailed elaboration of the image. In quite the same way the
dream-work succeeds in expressing much of the content of the latent dream
thought in the formal peculiarities of the manifest dream, in its clearness or
vagueness, in its division into several parts, etc. The number of fragmentary
dreams into which the dream is divided corresponds as a rule to the number
of main themes, of thought sequences in the latent dream; a short
preliminary dream often stands as an introduction or a motivation to the
complementary dream which follows; a subordinate clause in dream thought
is represented in the manifest dream as an interpolated change of scene, etc.
The form of the dream is itself, therefore, by no means without significance
and challenges interpretation. Different dreams of the same night often have
the same meaning, and testify to an increasing effort to control a stimulus of
growing urgency. In a single dream a particularly troublesome element may
be represented by "duplicates," that is, by numerous symbols.
By continually comparing dream thought with the manifest dream that
replaces it, we learn all sorts of things for which we were not prepared, as for
instance, the fact that even the nonsense and absurdity of the dream have
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