Whoever is going to sleep is, as it were, in the mental state of sinking
into a dark sea. (The sinking into water or darkness, entrance into a
forest, etc., are frequently-occurring threshold symbols.) The clearness
of ideas vanishes there and everything melts together just as did the
water and the atmosphere in the image.

This example is but to illustrate; it is in itself much too slight and
simple to make any striking revelation of the remarkable interlacing of
the two kinds of symbolism. I refer to my studies on symbolism and on
dreams in the bibliography. Exhaustive treatment at this point would lead
us too far afield. Let us rest satisfied then with the facts that the
psychoanalysts simultaneously deal with two fundamentally different lines
of interpretation in a product of the phantasy (dream, etc.), quite apart
from the multiple determinants which they can find within the material as
well as in the functional categories; both lines of interpretation are
supplied by the same fabric of images, indeed often by the same elements
of this image fabric. This context therefore must have been sought out
artfully enough by the creative unconscious to answer the double
requirement.

The coexistence of the material meaning with the functional is not
entirely puzzling to the student of psychoanalysis. Two facts must be kept
in mind throughout.

In the first place, we are acquainted with the principle of multiple
determination or condensation. The multiplicity of the dimly moving latent
dream thoughts condenses into a few clear dream forms or symbols, so that
one symbol continually, as it were, appears as the representative of
several ideas, and is therefore interpretable in several ways. That it
should be susceptible of more than one interpretation can cause no
surprise because the fundamental significance (the latent thoughts) were
the very ones that, by association, caused the selection of the symbols
from an infinite series of possibilities. In the shaping of the dream, and
therefore in the unconscious dream work, only such pictorial elements
could penetrate into consciousness as satisfied the requirements of the
multiple determination. The principle of multiple determination is valid
not only within the material and the functional categories, but makes the
fusion of both in the symbol in question to some extent intelligible.
Elements of both categories take an active part in the choice of the
symbol. On the one hand, a