"It can be said of the dream that the stone which was despised by the architect has become the corner-stone. The acorn of the dream, of the ephemeral and inconsiderable product of our soul, dates from the earliest times. Before that, men saw in the dream a prophecy for the future, a warning spirit, a comforter, a messenger of the gods. Now we join forces with it in order to explore the subconscious, to unravel the mysteries which it jealously guards and conceals. The dream does this with a completeness which amazes us. Freud's exact analysis has taught that the dream as it presents itself to us, exhibits merely a facade, which betrays nothing of the inmost part of the house. But where, by attention to certain rules we are able to bring the dreamer to express the sudden ideas awakened in him in talking over the sub-division of his dream, then it very quickly appears that the sudden ideas follow a determined direction, and are centralized about certain subjects, possessing a personal significance and betraying a meaning, which in the beginning would not have been suspected back of the dream, but which stand in a very close symbolical relation, even to details, to the dream facade. This peculiar thought-complex, in which all the threads of the dream are united, is the looked-for conflict in a certain variation which is determined by the circumstances. What is painful and contradictory in the conflict is so confused here that one can speak of a wish-fulfillment; let us, however, immediately add that the fulfilled wishes apparently are not wishes, but are such as frequently are contradictory to them. As an example let us use the case of a daughter who inwardly loves her mother and dreams that the latter is dead, much to her sorrow. Dreams like this are frequent. The contents make us think as little as possible of a wish-fulfillment, and so one might perhaps get the idea that Freud's assertion--that the dream presents in dramatic form a subconscious wish of the dreamer--is unjust.