I would refer you at this point to the reproduction of a picture by Schwind in the Schack Gallery at Munich[30] and would ask you to notice how correctly the artist has realized the way in which a dream arises out of a dominating situation. The picture is called _The Prisoner’s Dream_, and the subject of the dream must undoubtedly be his escape. It is a happy thought that the prisoner is to escape by the window, for it is through the window that the ray of light has entered and roused him from sleep. The gnomes standing one above the other no doubt represent the successive positions he would have to assume in climbing up to the window; and, if I am not mistaken and do not attribute too much intentional design to the artist, the features of the gnome at the top, who is filing the grating through (the very thing the prisoner himself would like to do), resemble the man’s own. I have said that in all dreams, other than those of children and such as conform to the infantile type, we encounter the obstacle of distortion. We cannot immediately say whether they too are wish-fulfilments, as we are inclined to suppose, nor can we guess from their manifest content in what mental stimulus they originate, or prove that they, like the others, endeavour to remove or relieve the stimulus. They must, in fact, be interpreted, i.e. translated; the process of distortion must be reversed, and the manifest content replaced by the latent thought, before we can make any definite pronouncement whether what we have found out about infantile dreams may claim to hold good for all dreams alike. NINTH LECTURE THE DREAM-CENSORSHIP Our study of children’s dreams has taught us how dreams originate, what their essential character is, and what their function. Dreams are the means of removing, by hallucinatory satisfaction, mental stimuli that disturb sleep. It is true that with the dreams of adults we have been able to explain one group only, those which we termed dreams of the infantile type. We do not yet know how it may be with the others, neither do we understand them. The result we have arrived at already is one, however, of which the significance is not to be under-estimated. Every time that we fully understand a dream it proves to be a wish-fulfilment; and this coincidence cannot be accidental or unimportant. Dreams of another type are assumed by us to be distorted substitutes for an unknown content, which first of all has to be traced; we have various grounds for this assumption, amongst others the analogy to our conception of errors. Our next task is to investigate and understand this _dream-distortion_.