Freud has been a
pioneer, has come to the conclusion, but in a different sense from the
popular belief, that dreams have a significance. While the popular belief
says that they foretell something of the future, science shows that they
have a meaning that is present in the psyche and determined by the past.
Dreams are then, as Freud's results show, always wish phantasies. [I give
here only exposition, not criticism. My later application of
psychoanalysis will show what reservations I make concerning Freud's
doctrines.] In them wishes, strivings, impulses work themselves out,
rising to the surface from the depths of the soul. When they come in
waking life, wish phantasies are sometimes called castles in the air. In
dreams we have the fulfillment of wishes that are not or cannot be
fulfilled.

But the impulses that the dreams call up are principally such wishes and
impulses as we cannot ourselves acknowledge and such as in a waking state
we reject as soon as they attempt to announce themselves, as for instance,
animal tendencies or such sexual desires as we are unwilling to admit, and
also suppressed or "repressed" impulses. As a result of being repressed
they have the peculiarity of being in general inaccessible to
consciousness. [Freud speaks particularly of crassly egoistic actuations.
The criminal element in them is emphasized by Stekel.]

One not initiated into dream analysis may object that the obvious evidence
is against this theory. For the majority of dreams picture quite
inoffensive processes that have nothing to do with impulses and passions
which are worthy of rejection on either moral or other grounds. The
objection appears at first sight to be well founded, but collapses as soon
as we learn that the critical power of morality, which does not desert us
by day, retains by night a part of its power; and that therefore the
fugitive impulses and tendencies that seek the darkness and dare not come
forth by day, dare not even at night unveil their true aspect but have to
approach, as it were, in costumes, or disguised as symbols or allegories,
in order to pass unchallenged. The superintending power, that I just now
called the power of morality, is compared very pertinently to a censor.
What our psyche produces is, so to speak, subjected to a censor before it
is allowed to emerge into the light of consciousness. And if the fugitive
elements want to venture forth they must be correspondingly disguised, in
order to p