It will not be difficult now to arrive at a still better understanding of anxiety-dreams. There is just one more observation to be made use of and then we may adopt an hypothesis which is supported by several considerations. The observation is that anxiety-dreams often have a content in which there is no distortion; it has, so to speak, escaped the censorship. This type of dream is frequently an undisguised wish-fulfilment, the wish being of course not one which the dreamer would accept but one which he has rejected; anxiety has developed in place of the working of the censorship. Whereas the infantile dream is an open fulfilment of a wish admitted by the dreamer, and the ordinary distorted dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish, the formula for the anxiety-dream is that it is the open fulfilment of a repressed wish. Anxiety is an indication that the repressed wish has proved too strong for the censorship and has accomplished or was about to accomplish its fulfilment in spite of it. We can understand that fulfilment of a repressed wish can only be, for us who are on the side of the censorship, an occasion for painful emotions and for setting up a defence. The anxiety then manifested in our dreams is, if you like to put it so, anxiety experienced because of the strength of wishes which at other times we manage to stifle. The study of dreams alone does not reveal to us why this defence takes the form of anxiety; obviously we must consider the latter in other connections. The hypothesis which holds good for anxiety-dreams without any distortion may be adopted also for those which have undergone some degree of distortion, and for other kinds of unpleasant dreams in which the accompanying unpleasant feelings probably approximate to anxiety. Anxiety-dreams generally wake us; we usually break off our sleep before the repressed wish behind the dream overcomes the censorship and reaches complete fulfilment. In such a case the dream has failed to achieve its purpose, but its essential character is not thereby altered. We have compared the dream with a night-watchman, a guardian of sleep, whose purpose it is to protect sleep from interruption. Now night-watchmen also, just like dreams, have to rouse sleepers when they are not strong enough to ward off the cause of disturbance or danger alone. Nevertheless we do sometimes succeed in continuing to sleep even when our dreams begin to give us some uneasiness and to turn to anxiety. We say to ourselves in sleep: “It is only a dream after all,” and go on sleeping.