et and learned how to piece them together so that their
message to man about himself became for the first time intelligible,
he furnished the human race with what will probably be considered its
most valuable key to the hidden mysteries of the mind. Freeing the
dream from the superstition of olden times and from the neglect of
later days, Freud was the first to discover that it is part and parcel
of man's mental life, that it has a purpose and a meaning and that the
meaning may be scientifically deciphered. It then invariably reveals
itself to be not a prophecy for the future but an interpretation of
the present and of the past, an invaluable synopsis of the drama which
is being staged within the personality of the dreamer.

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