“‘As regards the dream, all the troubles of waking life are transferred by it to the sleeping state; only the one thing, which can in some measure reconcile a cultured person to life-scientific and artistic enjoyment is not transferred....’ But even less discontented observers have laid emphasis on the fact that in dreams pain and disgust are more frequent than pleasure; so Scholz[59] (p. 39), Volkelt[72] (p. 80), and others. Indeed two ladies, Sarah Weed and Florence Hallam,[33] have found from the elaboration of their dreams a mathematical expression for the preponderance of displeasure in dreams. They designate 58 per cent. of the dreams as disagreeable, and only 28·6 per cent. as positively pleasant. Besides those dreams which continue the painful sensations of life during sleep, there are also dreams of fear, in which this most terrible of all disagreeable sensations tortures us until we awake, and it is with just these dreams of fear that children are so often persecuted (_Cf._ Debacker [17] concerning the Pavor Nocturnus), though it is in the case of children that you have found dreams of wishing undisguised.” Indeed it is the anxiety dreams which seem to prevent a generalisation of the thesis that the dream is a wish-fulfilment, which we have established by means of the examples in the last section; they seem even to brand this thesis as an absurdity. It is not difficult, however, to escape these apparently conclusive objections. Please observe that our doctrine does not rest upon an acceptance of the manifest dream content, but has reference to the thought content which is found to lie behind the dream by the process of interpretation. Let us contrast the _manifest_ and the _latent dream content_. It is true that there are dreams whose content is of the most painful nature. But has anyone ever tried to interpret these dreams, to disclose their latent thought content? If not, the two objections are no longer valid against us; there always remains the possibility that even painful and fearful dreams may be discovered to be wish fulfilments upon interpretation.[AE]