The forces participating in the dream-formation may be recognized as the following: the wish to sleep; the sum of occupation energy which still clings to the day remnants after the depression brought about by the state of sleep; the psychic energy of the unconscious wish forming the dream; and the opposing force of the “_censor_,” which exercises its authority in our waking state, and is not entirely abolished during sleep. The task of dream-formation is, above all, to overcome the inhibition of the censor, and it is just this task that is fulfilled by the displacement of the psychic energy within the material of the dream-thoughts. _The Formula for Wit-work_ Now we recall what caused us to think of the dream while investigating wit. We found that the character and activity of wit were bound up in certain forms of expression and technical means, among which the various forms of condensation, displacement, and indirect representation were the most conspicuous. But the processes which led to the same results—condensation, displacement, and indirect expression—we learned to know as peculiarities of dream-work. Does not this analogy almost force us to the conclusion that wit-work and dream-work must be identical at least in one essential point? I believe that the dream-work lies revealed before us in its most important characters, but in wit we find obscured just that portion of the psychic processes which we may compare with the dream-work, namely, the process of wit-formation in the first person. Shall we not yield to the temptation to construct this process according to the analogy of dream-formation? Some of the characteristics of dreams are so foreign to wit that that part of the dream-work corresponding to them cannot be carried over to the wit-formation. The regression of the stream of thought to perception certainly falls away as far as wit is concerned. However, the other two stages of dream-formation, the sinking of a foreconscious[57] thought into the unconscious, and the unconscious elaboration, would give us exactly the result which we might observe in wit if we assumed this process in wit-formation. Let us decide to assume that this is the proceeding of wit-formation in the case of the first person. _A foreconscious thought is left for a moment to unconscious elaboration and the results are forthwith grasped by the conscious perception._