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

young men the ambition phantasies generally prevail; in women, the erotic,
since they have banked their ambition on success in love. But often enough
the erotic desire appears in the background with men too; all the heroic
deeds and incidents are after all meant only to win the admiration and favor
of women. Otherwise these day dreams are very manifold and undergo
changing fates. They are either, each in turn, abandoned after a short time
and replaced by a new one, or they are retained, spun out into long stories,
and adapted to changes in daily circumstances. They move with the time, so
to speak, and receive from it a "time mark" which testifies to the influence of
the new situation. They are the raw material of poetic production, for out of
his day dreams the poet, with certain transformations, disguises and
omissions, makes the situations which he puts into his novels, romances and
dramas. The hero of the day dreams, however, is always the individual
himself, either directly or by means of a transparent identification with
another.
Perhaps day dreams bear this name because of the similarity of their relation
to reality, in order to indicate that their content is as little to be taken for real
as that of dreams. Perhaps, however, this identity of names does nevertheless
rest on a characteristic of the dream which is still unknown to us, perhaps
even one of those characteristics which we are seeking. It is possible, on the
other hand, that we are wrong in trying to read a meaning into this similarity
of designation. Yet that can only be cleared up later.
83