l psyche is so
flexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism. While the soul
really lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism.
For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process.

The living soul has its great fear. The living soul _fears_ the
automatically logical conclusion of incest. Hence the sleep-process
invariably draws this conclusion. The dream-process, fiendishly, plays
a triumph of automatism over us. But the dream-conclusion is almost
invariably just the _reverse_ of the soul's desire, in any
distress-dream. Popular dream-telling understood this, and pronounced
that you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it means
a funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you will
dream of his funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear that the
desire shall not be fulfilled. It is _fear_ which forms an
arrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automatically
produces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wished
your enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would present
you with his wedding.

Of course this rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in all
cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies
most often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic nature.

So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the living
psyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automatic
conclusion: the soul's just dread of automatism. And though this may
sound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of the
dream-trick.--That which is lovely to the automatic process is hateful
to the spontaneous soul. The wakeful living soul fears automatism as
it fears death: death being automatic.

It seems to me these are the first two dream-principles, and the two
most important: the principle of automatism and the principle of
inversion. They will not resolve everything for us, but they will help
a great deal. We have to be _very_ wary of giving way to dreams. It is
really a sin against ourselves to prostitute the living spontaneous
soul to the tyranny of dreams, or of chance, or fortune or luck, or
any of the processes of the automatic sphere.

Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, the dream-image generally.
Any _significant_ dream-image is usually an image or a symbol of some
arrest or scotch in the living spontaneous psyche. There is another
principle. But if the image i