So far we have mainly been concerned with probing after the hidden meaning of dreams, the route we should take to discover it, and the means the dream-work has employed to hide it.
the Interpretation Of Dreamsby sigmund Freud
Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.
Alternatives are difficult to represent, and in some cases they are expressed by the division of the dream into two halves of equal length.
Alternatives / division / dream / represent
The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream “no” does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one.
contradictions / dream / exist / no / unity
It is the relation of similarity, congruence, or convergence, the just like, which dreams have the most various means of expressing better than anything else.
Psychoanalysis is right to be mistrustful. One of its rules runs: whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance.
analysis / disturbs / mistrustful / Psychoanalysis / resistance
But since Freud still conceives the mind as a closed system, desires are not expelled but only hidden away.
At first this gives the impression that the psychical intensity of the particular ideas was not taken into consideration at all in their selection for the dream, but only the varying nature and degree of their determination.
determination / dream / ideas / impression / intensity
This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.
The thought suggests itself that a psychical power is operative in the dream-work which on the one hand strips the psychically valuable elements of their intensity, and on the other creates new values by way of over-determination out of elements of low value; it is the new values that then reach the dream-content.