Let us take once more that dream to which we have already reverted several times, the one about the three theatre tickets for one florin and a half. I can assure you that I had no ulterior motive in selecting it in the first instance for an illustration. You know what the latent thoughts were: the vexation, after hearing that her friend had only just become engaged, that she herself should have married so hastily; depreciation of her husband and the idea that she could have found a better one if only she had waited. We also know already that the wish which made a dream out of these thoughts was the desire to “look on,” to be able to go to the theatre—very probably an offshoot of an old curiosity to find out at last what really does happen after marriage. It is well known that in children this curiosity is regularly directed towards the sexual life of the parents; that is to say, it is an infantile impulse and, wherever it persists later in life, it has its roots in the infantile period. But the news received on the day previous to the dream gave no occasion for the awakening of this skoptophilia; it only roused vexation and regret. This wish-impulse (of skoptophilia) was not at first connected with the latent thoughts, and the results of the dream-interpretation could have been used by the analysis without taking it into consideration at all. But again, the vexation was not in itself capable of producing a dream: no dream could be formed out of the thought: “It was folly to be in such a hurry to marry” until that thought had stirred up the early wish to see at last what happened after marriage. Then this wish formed the dream-content, substituting for marriage the going to the theatre; and the form was that of the fulfilment of the earlier wish: “Now I may go to the theatre and look at all that we have never been allowed to see; and you may not. I am married and you have got to wait.” In this way the actual situation was transformed into its opposite and an old triumph substituted for the recent discomfiture; and incidentally, satisfaction both of a ‘gazing’ impulse and of one of egoistic rivalry was brought about. It is this latter satisfaction which determines the manifest content of the dream; for in it she is actually sitting in the theatre, while her friend cannot get in. Those portions of the dream-content behind which the latent thoughts still conceal themselves are to be found in the form of inappropriate and incomprehensible modifications of the gratifying situation. The business of _interpretation_ is to put aside those features in the whole which merely represent a wish-fulfilment and to reconstruct the painful latent dream-thoughts from these indications.