Thirdly, if you call to mind our idea that the dreamer striving against his own wishes is like a combination of two persons, separate and yet somehow intimately united, you will be able to understand another possible way in which something that is highly unpleasant may be brought about through wish-fulfilment: I am speaking of punishment. Here again the fairy-tale of the three wishes may help to make things clear. The sausages on the plate were the direct fulfilment of the first person’s (the woman’s) wish; the sausages on the tip of her nose were the fulfilment of the second person’s (the husband’s) wish, but at the same time they were the punishment for the foolish wish of the wife. In the neuroses we shall meet with wishes corresponding in motivation to the third wish of the fairy-tale, the only one left. There are many such punishment tendencies in the mental life of man; they are very strong and we may well regard them as responsible for some of our painful dreams. Now you will probably think that with all this there is very little of the famous wish-fulfilment left; but on closer consideration you will admit that you are wrong. In comparison with the manifold possibilities (to be discussed later) of what dreams might be—according to some writers, what they actually are—the solution: wish-fulfilment, anxiety-fulfilment, punishment-fulfilment, is surely quite a narrow one. Add to this, that anxiety is the direct opposite of a wish and that opposites lie very near one another in association and, as we have learned, actually coincide in the unconscious. Moreover, punishment itself is the fulfilment of a wish, namely, the wish of the other, censoring person.