The dream is a fragment of this great urge of the individual's inside activity, hence Freud called it a wish-fulfilment, as Heraclitus, the original pragmatist, did 500 B.C. This Greek philosopher truly said,
were, and thus the feelings get related to ideas and to objective forms. As the dream is in tensely creative, the objects first chosen may not be considered consciously eligible for expres sion, hence a form of camouflage takes place— these are technically termed in psychoanalytic literature distortions or displacements, con densations or secondary elaborations, so that by a process of caricature the original cravings come to a process of expression in a form which the cultural level of the individual will permit. This completed product is termed the manifest content of the dreamer. It is the elaborated, modified caricature of the original type of striv ing, distorted, and may be rendered almost un intelligible to the dreamer. Yet it has done its work. It has helped to conserve sleep and dis charged the energy which lay behind the craving.
Children's dreams are apt to express their cravings with but little symbolic distortion. As the individual grows up, however, these more childish strivings take on more definite char acter, but in the dream are subjected to greater and greater distortion. Hence in most adults the wish is much modified in its presented and pre sentable form. All dreams mean something. It may not be possible to find out, or it may not be worth while, but it is certain that they have a physiological function just as much as does respiration, circulation, digestion, etc. The analysis of these latter functions is still very imperfect, so also is the analysis of the dream function. Human knowledge of human activi ties is still far from satisfactory, but in dream comprehension a great advance "hasbeen made by recent psychoanalytic investigation. For the literature to 1917 and full discussion, consult Jelliffe, 'Technique of Psychoanalysis> (Ner vous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, New York and Washington).