Having decided upon the respective contents, the next step in dream analysis is to convert the Latent Content into the Manifest Content, in other words to bring the hidden meaning of the Latent Content into the broad and easily comprehended light of the Manifest Content. However simple this may sound, it is something of an intricate process owing to the careful repression on the part of the Manifest Content, and owing also to the general unwillingness of dreamers to accept the Freudian interpretation of the Latent Content.

A third element in the modern dream, one that the older oneirocritics do not employ in their mechanism, is the Censor. This is, figuratively speaking, a bar to the gate of consciousness, past which dreams do not slip if they are either outwardly reprehensible, or of such a nature as to awaken the dreamer. To this Censor the Manifest Content owes its entire existence, for without the Censor the Manifest Content would become tinged with the inevitable eroticism of the Latent Content and therefore part of it.

The methods employed by the Latent Content for passing the Censor are many. Symbols, innuendoes, allegories, hints, puns, veiled suggestion, anything, in fact by which a dream idea may slip past the Censor's gate and express the dreamer's hidden desire.

The dream of the death of a parent, held by Freud as a typical dream of frequent recurrence, a wish dream of unvarying significance, furnishes an example of the Latent Content, Manifest Content and the work of the Censor. The Manifest Content is obviously the dream itself, i.e., of the mother's death. The latent Content Freud discovers in the hidden wish, the wish that the mother might die. The dream passes the Censor through its apparent harmlessness.

The following example of Freudian and modern dream analysis is taken from a series of lectures given by an American follower of Freud. The phrasing is slightly altered, but the substance is the same.

A young woman dreamed that she walked up Fifth Avenue with a girl friend. They paused before a milliner's window, looked at the hats and, in her dream, she purchased one. Here the Manifest Content is evidently the walk up Fifth Avenue and the purchase of a hat. For the Latent Content we must wander afield. On the day before her dream the young woman had actually taken a walk on Fifth Avenue with the friend of her dream; she had, however, not bought a hat although she had looked in the milliner's window. The analyst therefore holds as the Latent Content (necessarily a wish) the desire for a hat that the dreamer could not afford. This desire, however, is not sufficiently strong nor morbid for a dream incentive, there must be a still more complex Latent Content. Questioning elicits the fact that dreamer's husband was ill at the time of her dream. Although the wife was aware that the illness was not serious, she showed an unreasoning fear that harm might come of it; she refused to leave his bedside even for a moment and showed such morbid anxiety, that her husband himself at length coaxed her to go for a walk, in the hope that she would return in a happier mood. In this abnormal anxiety the analyst found his Latent Content. The conversation between the dreamer and her friend next awaits investigation. She admits that among other subjects the name of a man whom she had known before her marriage was mert-tioned. Formerly he had been rather attentive to her, but she had not regarded his attentions as serious, he being her superior in wealth. This condition presented the sex question, essential to the Freudian analysis, combined with the element of female vanity, an offshoot of the sex question, as represented in the desire for a hat. The dreamer admitted that she would have liked to have had one had she been able to afford it. In the dream, however, having bought the hat, she established the strength of the suppressed wish.

The style of hat purchased in the dream next claims the analyst's attention. The dreamer thinks it was a black hat.

This admission, insignificant on the surface, is held as important by the analyst. The symbolism of black is mourning, the determining factor of the unexpressed wish is a symbol of death. Analysis therefore shows the mourning hat as the true key to the dream. The abnormal disquiet at the thought of the husband's death in the waking life is merely an hysterical effort at concealing the desire expressed in the black hat, namely that the husband might die in order that the subject might marry a richer man. In the dream the subject had the money that she did not possess in real life. The purchase of a hat on Fifth Avenue suggests a wealthy husband.

In the example we have the Manifest Content or the dream as the dreamer sees it. The Latent Content or the story as interpreted by the Analyst, and the Censor or guardian of the patient's self-respect, who forces the use of the Latent Content.

"In the Latent Content the dream material seems to concern matters which were very trivial," observes the eminent authority to whom we are indebted for the analysis.

This probing the soul for secrets to be turned from the Latent Content into the Manifest is called the Dream Work.

This Dream Work embodies four processes: First, Condensation; Second, Dream Mechanism; Third, Dramatization; Fourth, Elaboration.

Condensation consists of the process of condensing the Latent Content and its factors into the Manifest Content. The Latent Content is frequently scattered, elaborate and difficult to find. One element of the Manifest Content is usually composed of several elements in the Latent Content, as when the purchase of a new hat symbolized both the death of the dreamer's husband and escape from poverty through a desirable marriage.

Condensation is a fusion of the memory of several different scenes or objects into new scenes or objects, or the combination of different persons into one person; also the changing of different words and sentences into seemingly senseless phrases or neologisms. The dreams of Alice, in "Alice in Wonderland" are examples of Condensation.