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At the climax of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Demetrius is released from his transferential infatuation with Hermia. This happens when he awakens from a dream that has successfully matched his current feelings for Hermia with a repressed libidinal fantasy of childhood. This example illustrates how condensation in dreams functions adaptively in matching a new experience with previously stored representations of related events in the past. It also illustrates the ability of the matching process to go beyond the narrow logical categories of waking thought to reach deeper levels of experience otherwise inaccessible to the dreamer. This ability accounts for the important role played by dreaming in the creative process generally and in the day-to-day working-through process of psychoanalytic therapy.
Freud's idea that dreams are an inner dramatization of the dreamer's unfulfilled wishes is, of course, much older than Freud. We find it in the work of the Greek tragedians (1) and in Shakespeare's plays. Near the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream (2), for example, Theseus offers what we recognize as the Freudian viewpoint on the tales told by the young lovers about their adventures of the previous night in the woods outside Athens:
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or, in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (V, 1, 18-22)
In our post-Freudian language, the tales are fantasies of wish fulfillment, psychodynamically indistinguishable from dreams. Like dreams, they reflect the drive states of the dreamers, rather than the actual events they have experienced. But Theseus's new bride, Hippolyta, feels that this interpretation does not do justice to the lovers' tales. She says: