The process of dreaming transfers psychical intensity from what is important, but also objectionable, onto what is insignificant.
intensityquotes
If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance.
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.
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.
But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations.
Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.
By comparison with a passionate age, an age without passion gains in scope what is loses in intensity.
