that of an arm or leg.[39] In this way you will to some extent succeed in overcoming the awkwardness of rendering alphabetic characters into hieroglyphs. When you come to represent those parts of speech which indicate thought-relations, e.g. “because,” “therefore,” “but,” and so on, you have no such means as those described to assist you; so that these parts of the text must be lost, so far as your translation into pictorial form is concerned. Similarly, the content of the dream-thoughts is resolved by the dream-work into its ‘raw material,’ consisting of objects and activities. You may be satisfied if there is any possibility of indicating somehow, by a more minute elaboration of the images, certain relations which cannot be represented in themselves. In a precisely similar manner the dream-work succeeds in expressing much of the content of the latent thoughts by means of peculiarities in the _form_ of the manifest dream, by its distinctness or obscurity, its division into various parts, etc. The number of parts into which a dream is divided corresponds as a rule with the number of its main themes, the successive trains of thought in the latent dream; a short preliminary dream often stands in an introductory or causal relation to the subsequent detailed main dream; whilst a subordinate dream-thought is represented by the interpolation into the manifest dream of a change of scene, and so on. The form of dreams, then, is by no means unimportant in itself, and itself demands interpretation. Several dreams in the same night often have the same meaning, and indicate an endeavour to control more and more completely a stimulus of increasing urgency. In a single dream, a specially difficult element may be represented by “doubling” it, i.e. by more than one symbol. If we continue the comparison of dream-thoughts with the manifest dreams representing them, we discover in all directions things we should never have expected, e.g. that even nonsense and absurdity in dreams have their meaning; in fact, at this point the contrast between the medical and the psycho-analytic view of dreams becomes more marked than ever before. According to the medical view, the dream is absurd because while dreaming our mental activity has renounced its functions; according to our view, on the other hand, the dream becomes absurd when it has to represent a criticism implicit in the latent thoughts—the opinion: “It is absurd.” The dream I told you, about the visit to the theatre (“three tickets for one florin and a half”) is a good example of this: the opinion thus expressed was as follows: “It was _absurd_ to marry so early.”