xpression. This has its use, because
on awaking the dream does not shock us, since we make no attempt to
analyze or trace back in the dream the symbol's original meaning. Hence
we find that the manifest content is often filled with symbols which
occasionally give us the clue to the dream analysis.

The dream then brings surcease from our maladjustments: If we are denied
power, influence, or love by society or by individuals, we can obtain
these desiderata in our dreams. We can possess in dreams the things
which we cannot have by day. In sleep the poor man becomes a Midas, the
ugly woman handsome, the childless woman surrounded by children, and
those who in daily life live upon a crust in their dreams dine like
princes (after living upon canned goods for two months in the Dry
Tortugas, the burden of my every dream was food). Where the wished-for
things are compatible with our daily code, they are remembered on
awaking as they were dreamed. Society, however, will not allow the
unmarried woman to have children, however keen her desire for them.
Hence her dreams in which the wish is gratified are remembered in
meaningless words and symbols.

Long before the time Freud's doctrine saw the light of day, William
James gave the key to what I believed to be the true explanation of the
wish. Thirty years ago he wrote:

I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my
selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I
could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great
athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a _bon vivant_,
and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist,
a statesman, a warrior, and African explorer, as well as a
"tone-poet" and a saint. But the thing is simply impossible.
The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the
_bon vivant_ and the philanthropist would trip each other up;
the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house
in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may
conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man.
But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less
be suppressed.

What James is particularly emphasizing here is that the human organism
is instinctively capable of developing along many different lines, but
that due to the stress of civilization some of these instinctive
capacities must be thwarted. In