situation which had just been reached in the treatment gave good grounds for the suspicion that a carefully-suppressed critical antagonism to her much loved and honoured father had played a part in this dream. Following out her further associations, apparently quite remote from the dream, she told how she had heard a long discussion of psychological questions on the day before and a relative had said: “Primitive man (_Urmensch_) survives in all of us.” Now a light dawns on us. Here was again a splendid opportunity for her to imagine that her dead father survived, and so in the dream she made him a “clock-man” (_Uhrmensch_), telling the quarters up to the time of the midday meal. The likeness to a pun in this cannot be ignored, and as a matter of fact it has often happened that a dreamer’s pun has been ascribed to the interpreter; there are yet other examples in which it is not at all easy to decide whether we are dealing with a joke or a dream. But you will remember that the same sort of doubt arose with some slips of the tongue. A man related as a dream that he and his uncle were sitting in the latter’s _auto_ (automobile) and his uncle kissed him. The dreamer himself instantly volunteered the interpretation: it meant “_auto-erotism_” (a term used in our theory of the libido, signifying gratification obtained without any external love-object). Now was this man allowing himself a joke at our expense and pretending that a pun which occurred to him was part of a dream? I do not think so: he really did dream it. But where does this bewildering resemblance between dreams and jokes come from? At one time this question took me somewhat out of my way, for it necessitated my making a thorough investigation into the question of wit itself. This led to the conclusion that wit originates as follows: a preconscious train of thought is for a moment left to a process of unconscious elaboration, from which it emerges in the form of a witticism. While under the influence of the unconscious it is subject to the mechanisms there operative—to condensation and displacement; that is to say, to the same processes as we found at work in the dream-work; and the similarity sometimes found between dreams and wit is to be ascribed to this character common to both. But the unintentional “dream joke” does not amuse us as does an ordinary witticism; a deeper study of wit may show you why this is so. The “dream joke” strikes us as a poor form of wit; it does not make us laugh, it leaves us cold.