llic nature.

[8] The two halves of the scrotum.

[9] See _Zentralblatt fuer Psychoanalyse_, vol. i., p. 2.

VI

THE WISH IN DREAMS

That the dream should be nothing but a wish-fulfillment surely seemed
strange to us all--and that not alone because of the contradictions
offered by the anxiety dream.

After learning from the first analytical explanations that the dream
conceals sense and psychic validity, we could hardly expect so simple a
determination of this sense. According to the correct but concise
definition of Aristotle, the dream is a continuation of thinking in
sleep (in so far as one sleeps). Considering that during the day our
thoughts produce such a diversity of psychic acts--judgments,
conclusions, contradictions, expectations, intentions, &c.--why should
our sleeping thoughts be forced to confine themselves to the production
of wishes? Are there not, on the contrary, many dreams that present a
different psychic act in dream form, _e.g._, a solicitude, and is not
the very transparent father's dream mentioned above of just such a
nature? From the gleam of light falling into his eyes while asleep the
father draws the solicitous conclusion that a candle has been upset and
may have set fire to the corpse; he transforms this conclusion into a
dream by investing it with a senseful situation enacted in the present
tense. What part is played in this dream by the wish-fulfillment, and
which are we to suspect--the predominance of the thought continued from,
the waking state or of the thought incited by the new sensory
impression?

All these considerations are just, and force us to enter more deeply
into the part played by the wish-fulfillment in the dream, and into the
significance of the waking thoughts continued in sleep.

It is in fact the wish-fulfillment that has already induced us to
separate dreams into two groups. We have found some dreams that were
plainly wish-fulfillments; and others in which wish-fulfillment could
not be recognized, and was frequently concealed by every available
means. In this latter class of dreams we recognized the influence of the
dream censor. The undisguised wish dreams were chiefly found in
children, yet fleeting open-hearted wish dreams _seemed_ (I purposely
emphasize this word) to occur also in adults.

We may now ask whence the wish fulfilled in the dream originates. But to
what opposition or to what diversity do we refer this "whence"? I think
it is to the o