"[T]o interpret a dream" is to specify its "meaning," to replace it by something which takes its position in the concatenation of our psychic activities as a link of definite importance and value. (188)

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The next step was to treat the dream itself as a symptom, and to apply to it the method of interpretation which had been worked out for such symptoms. (192)

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Thus identification is not mere imitation, but an assimilation based upon the same etiological claim; it expresses a "just like," and refers to some common condition which has remained in the unconscious. (228)

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A dream works under a kind of compulsion which forces it to combine into a unified whole all the sources of dream-stimulation which are offered to it. (248)

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The dream often appears to have several meanings; not only may several wish-fulfilments be combined in it, as our examples show, but one meaning or one wish fulfilment may conceal another, until in the lowest stratum one comes upon the fulfilment of a wish from the earliest period of childhood [...] (276)

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When two psychic formations, an affective inclination and a conceptual content, are intimately connected, either one being actually present will evoke the other, even in a dream [...] (289)

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Generally speaking, we are not in a position to interpret another person's dream if he is unwilling to furnish us with the unconscious thoughts which lie behind the dream-content, and for this reason the practical application of our method of dream-interpretation is often seriously restricted. (291-92)

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The imposter is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and the moralizing tendency betrays a hazy knowlege of the fact that there is a question, in the latent dream-content, of forbidden wishes, victims of repression. (294)

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This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin. (294)

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One learns in a psychoanalysis to interpret temporal proximity by material connection; two ideas which are apparently without connection, but which occur in immediate succession, belong to a unity which has to be deciphered; just as an a and a b, when written in succession, must be pronounced as one syllable, ab. (296)

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A child is absolutely egoistical; he feels his wants acutely, and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially against his competitors, other children, and first of all against his brothers and sister. (299)

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The obsessional neurosis [...] corresponds to a super-moralit, which develops as a strong reinforcement against the primary character that is threatening to revive. (299)

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Just as all neurotic symptoms, like dreams themselves, are capable of hyper-interpretation, and even require such hyper-interpretation before they become perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation. (310-11)

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All dreams are absolutely egoistical; in every dream the beloved ego appears, even though in a disguised form. The wishes that are realized in dreams are invariably the wishes of this ego [...] (312)

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The dream-thoughts and the dream-content present themselves as two descriptions of the same content in two different languages; or, to put it more clearly, the dream-content appears to us as a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose symbols and laws of composition we must learn by comparing the origin with the translation. (319)

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The dream-content is, as it were, presented in hieroglyphics, whose symbols must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. It would of course, be incorrect to attempt to read these symbols in accordance with their values as pictures, instead of in accordance with their meaning as symbols [... as] a picture-puzzle (rebus) [...] (319)

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Every element of the dream-content proves to be over-determined -- that is, it appears several times over in the dream-thoughts [... and] not only are the elements of the dream determined several times over by the dream-thoughts, but the individual dream-thoughts are represented in the dream by several elements [...] The dream-elements have been formed out of the whole mass of the dream-thoughts, and [...] every one of them appears, in relation to the dream-thoughts, to have a multiple determination. (324)

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The dream is, as it were, centered elsewhere; its content is arranged about elements which do not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts. (336)

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It now becomes very probable that a psychic force expresses itself in the dream-work which, on the one hand, strips the elements of the high psychic value of their intensity and, on the other hand, by means of over-determination, creates new significant values from elements of slight value, which new values then make their way into the dream-content. (338)

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The dream renders an account of the connection which is undeniably present between all the portions of the dream-thoughts by combining this material into a unity as a situation or a proceedin. It reproduces logical connection in the form of simultaneity [...] Whenever it shows two elements close together, it vouches for a particularly intimate connection between their corresponding representatives in the dream-thoughts. (342-43)

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All dreams of the same night belong, in respect of their content, to the same whole; their division into several parts, their groupings and number, are all full of meaning and may be regarded as pieces of information about the latent dream-thoughts. (357)

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The interesting problem allied to this, as to what is meant if a certain content in the dream is characterized in the dream itself as having been "dreamed" -- the riddle of a "dream within a dream" -- has been solved in a similar way [...] Here again the part of the dream "dreamed" is to be depreciated in value and robbed of its reality; that which the dreamer continues to dream after waking from the "dream within a dream" is wat the dream-wish desires to put in place of the obliterated reality. It may therefore be assumed that the part "dreamed" contains the represented reality, the real memory, while, on the other hand, the continued dream contains the representation of what the dreamer merely wishes. (366)

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A word, as the point of junction of a number of ideas, possesses, as it were, a predestined ambiguity, and neuroses (obsessions, phobias) take advantage of the opportunities for condensation and disguise afforded by words quite as eagerly as do dreams. (362)

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In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly represented, by way of distortion, as the entry of the child into water; among many other instances, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses, and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. (395)

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Even the neurosis itself, the sick person, is often separated from the dreamer and exhibited in the dream as an independent person. (401)

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It has not only torn them from their context and mutilated them, accepting one fragment and rejecting another, but it has often fitted them together in a novel manner, so that the speech which seems coherent in a dream is dissolved by analysis into three or four components. (494)

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In our interpretation the rule will be, in every case, to disregard the apparent coherence of the dream as being of suspicious origin and, whether the elements are confused or clear, to follow the same path to the dream-material. (463)