e, its mother hands it something else and moves the
object about until the child reaches out for it. When the adult strives
for something which society denies him, his environment offers him, if
he is normal, something which is "almost as good," although it may not
wholly take the place of the thing he originally strove for. This in
general is the process of substitution or sublimation. It is never
complete from the first moment of childhood. Consequently it is natural
to suppose that many of the things which have been denied us should at
times beckon to us. But since they are banned they must beckon in
devious ways. These sometime grim specters both of the present and of
the past cannot break through the barriers of our staid and sober waking
moments, so they exhibit themselves, at least to the initiated, in
shadowy form in reverie, and in more substantial form in the slips we
make in conversation and in writing, and in the things we laugh at; but
clearest of all in dreams. I say the meaning is clear to the initiated
because it does require special training and experience to analyze these
seemingly nonsensical slips of tongue and pen, these highly elaborated
and apparently meaningless dreams, into the wishes (instinct and habit
impulses) which gave them birth. It is fortunate for us that we are
protected in this way from having to face openly many of our own wishes
and the wishes of our friends.

We get our clue to the dream as being a wish fulfilment by taking the
dreams of children. Their dreams are as uncensored as is their
conversation. Before Christmas my own children dreamed nightly that they
had received the things they wanted for Christmas. The dreams were
clear, logical, and open wishes. Why should the dreams of adults be less
logical and less open unless they are to act as concealers of the wish?
If the dream processes in the child run in an orderly and logical way,
would it indeed not be curious to find the dream processes of the adult
less logical and full of meaning?

This argument gives us good a priori grounds for supposing that the
dreams of adults too are full of meaning and are logical; that there is
a wish in every dream and that the wish is fulfilled in the dream. The
reason dreams appear illogical is due to the fact that if the wish were
to be expressed in its logical form it would not square with our
everyday habits of thought and action. We should be disinclined to admit
even to ourselves that w