As modern man has swung away from the idea of the dream as a warning or a prophecy, he has accepted the even more untrue conception of dreaming as the mere sport of sleep,—­the “babble of the mind,” the fantastic and insignificant freak-play of undirected mental processes, or the result of physical sensations without relation to the rest of mental life.  No wonder, then, that Freud’s startling dictum, “A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish,” should be met with astonishment and incredulity.  When a person is confronted for the first time with this statement, he invariably begins to cite dreams in which he is pursued by wild beasts, or in which his loved ones are seen lying dead.  He then triumphantly asserts that no such dream could be the fulfilment of a wish.

The trouble is that he has overlooked the word “disguised.”  Like wit and some figures of speech, a dream says something different from what it means.  It deals in symbols.  Its “manifest content” may be merely a fantastic and impossible scene without apparent rhyme or reason, but the “latent content,” the hidden meaning, always expresses some urgent personal problem.  Although the dream may seem to be impersonal and unemotional, it nevertheless deals in every case with some matter of vital concern to the dreamer himself.  It is a condensed and composite picture of some present problem and of some related childish repressed wish which the experiences of the preceding day have aroused.

As Frink says, a dream is like a cartoon with the labels omitted—­absolutely unintelligible until its symbols are interpreted.  Although some dreams whose symbolism is that which man has always used, can be easily understood by a person who knows, many 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.