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1 If a man has an emotional experience when asleep or awake and is able to convert it into alpha-elements, he can either remain unconscious of that emotional experience or become conscious of it. The sleeping man has an emotional experience, converts it into alpha-elements and so becomes capable of dream thoughts. Thus he is free to become conscious (that is wake up) and describe the emotional experience by a narrative usually known as a dream.
2 A man talking to a friend converts the sense impressions of this emotional experience into alpha-elements, thus becoming capable of dream thoughts and therefore of undisturbed consciousness of the facts whether the facts are the events in which he participates or his feelings about those events or both. He is able to remain “asleep” or unconscious of certain elements that cannot penetrate the barrier presented by his “dream”. Thanks to the “dream” he can continue uninterruptedly to be awake, that is, awake to the fact that he is talking to his friend, but asleep to elements which, if they could penetrate the barrier of his “dreams”, would lead to domination of his mind by what are ordinarily unconscious ideas and emotions.
The dream makes a barrier against mental phenomena which might overwhelm the patient's awareness that he is talking to a friend, and at the same time makes it impossible for awareness that he is talking to a friend to overwhelm his phantasies. The psychotic's attempt to discriminate one from the other leads to rational thought characterized by a peculiar lack of “resonance”. What he says clearly and in articulated speech is one dimensional. It has no overtones or undertones of meaning. It makes the listener inclined to say “so what?” It has no capacity to evoke a train of thought.