V — The Material and Sources of Dreams

After coming to realise from the analysis of the dream of Irma’s injection that the dream is the fulfilment of a wish, our interest was next directed to ascertaining whether we had thus discovered a universal characteristic of the dream, and for the time being we put aside every other question which may have been aroused in the course of that interpretation. Now that we have reached the goal upon one of these paths, we may turn back and select a new starting-point for our excursions among the problems of the dream, even though we may lose sight for a time of the theme of wish-fulfilment, which has been as yet by no means exhaustively treated.

Now that we are able, by applying our process of interpretation, to discover a latent dream content which far surpasses the manifest dream content in point of significance, we are impelled to take up the individual dream problems afresh, in order to see whether the riddles and contradictions which seemed, when we had only the manifest content, beyond our reach may not be solved for us satisfactorily.