cious in a symbolic language" (Colt, 1995, p. 36), actually disguises the impulse toward wish fulfillment, thus not disturbing the sleeper. Freud (1978, p. 175) describes the "work of condensation," whereby the symbols of the reported dream seem straightforward but result in voluminous interpretation of those symbols.
The concept of wish-fulfillment is multilayered. At one level, the body wishes to sleep, and the dream is instrumental for that purpose. At a second and more complex level, dream content symbolically expresses Ucs infantile wish-fulfillment: "the child with all his impulses survives in the dream" (Freud, 1978, p. 94). These impulses, further, are fundamentally sexual, expressing repressed anxieties though immediately stimulated by day residue. This concept implies that dream experience is equated with neurotic experience; and just as the neurotic patient is driven by unconscious mental activities, so is the dreamer. Accordingly, determining the meaning and significance of a dream may provide clues to the real nature of a dreamer's psyche. O
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