dreams are
meaningless, even to an experienced analyst, until the patient himself
furnishes the labels by telling what each bit of the picture brings to
his mind. The dream, as a rule, merely furnishes the starting-point
for free association.

Each symbol is an arrow pointing the way to forbidden impulses which
are repressed in waking life but which find partial expression during
sleep. The subconscious part of the conscience is still on the job, so
the repressed desires can express themselves only in distorted ways
which will not arouse the censor and disturb sleep. The purpose of the
dream is thus two-fold,--to relieve the tensions of unsatisfied
desire, and to do this in such a subtle way as to keep the dreamer
asleep. Sometimes it fails of its purpose, but when there is danger of
our discovering too much about ourselves, we immediately wake up,
saying that we have had a bad dream.

It is at first difficult to believe that we are capable of this
elaborate mental work while we are fast asleep. However, a little
investigation shows us to be more clever than we realize. The
subconscious mind, in its effort to satisfy both the repressing and
the repressed impulses, carries on very complicated processes,
disguises material by allowing one person to stand for another, two
persons to stand for one, or one person to stand for two; it shifts
emotion from important to trivial matters, dramatizes, condenses, and
elaborates, with a skill that is amazing. We are all of us very clever
playwrights and makers of allegories--in our sleep. Also, we are all
very clever at getting what we want, and the dream secures for us, in
a way, something which we want very much indeed and which the world
of social restraint or our own warped childish notion denies us.

Not every one can become an interpreter of dreams. It takes a skilled
and patient specialist thoroughly to understand the process. But it is
fortunate indeed that we possess such a valuable means of diagnosis
when extraordinary conditions make it necessary to explore the
subconscious in the search for trouble-making complexes.[42]

[Footnote 42: For further study of the dream, see Freud:
_Interpretation of Dreams_; and _General Introduction to
Psycho-Analysis_.]

=The Word-Test.= Although dreams furnish the main clues to buried
complexes, they are by no means the only instrument of the
psycho-analyst. Another device, called the association word-test, has
been developed by Dr