I hope that the above discussion and examples will suffice—­until further objection can be raised—­to make it seem credible that even dreams with a painful content are to be analyzed as the fulfillments of wishes.  Nor will it seem a matter of chance that in the course of interpretation one always happens upon subjects of which one does not like to speak or think.  The disagreeable sensation which such dreams arouse is simply identical with the antipathy which endeavors—­usually with success—­to restrain us from the treatment or discussion of such subjects, and which must be overcome by all of us, if, in spite of its unpleasantness, we find it necessary to take the matter in hand.  But this disagreeable sensation, which occurs also in dreams, does not preclude the existence of a wish; every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.  We are, on other grounds, justified in connecting the disagreeable character of all these dreams with the fact of dream disfigurement, and in concluding that these dreams are distorted, and that the wish-fulfillment in them is disguised until recognition is impossible for no other reason than that a repugnance, a will to suppress, exists in relation to the subject-matter of the dream or in relation to the wish which the dream creates.  Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor.  We shall take into consideration everything which the analysis of disagreeable dreams has brought to light if we reword our formula as follows:  The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.

Now there still remain as a particular species of dreams with painful content, dreams of anxiety, the inclusion of which under dreams of wishing will find least acceptance with the uninitiated.  But I can settle the problem of anxiety dreams in very short order; for what they may reveal is not a new aspect of the dream problem; it is a question in their case of understanding neurotic anxiety in general.  The fear which we experience in the dream is only seemingly explained by the dream content.  If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends.  For example, it is true that it is possible to fall out of a window, and that some care must be exercised when one is near a window, but it is inexplicable why the anxiety in the corresponding phobia is so great, and why it follows its victims to an extent so much greater than is warranted by its origin.  The same explanation, then, which applies to the phobia applies also to the dream of anxiety.  In both cases the anxiety is only superficially attached to the idea which accompanies it and comes from another source.