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Budapest, October 12, 1908
Dear Professor,
Lately I have caught hold of daydreams in myself and in others and tried to explain them. The result was, naturally, the full confirmation of your theory of dreams. In your “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”1 I find the undistorted wishful daydreams fully explained. In my experience, however, fantasies are often (usually) subjected to the same distortions as night-dreams. There are, for example, very many anxious dreams (imaginings of unpleasant eventualities or probabilities, often also pleasurable fantasies which are seemingly quite unjustified). Partly daydreams are impatient fantasies about unpleasant things that lie ahead. The “wish fulfillment” in this case is mainly the circumstance that the expected trouble is presented as immediate—one is therefore rid of the anxiety of expectation. This corresponds approximately to the frequently repeated wish, “If only I had already overcome it!”
Part of these fantasies goes further and adds to the anticipated unpleasant events in the fantasy less unfavorable ones, which signify finally a good outcome to the bad things which cannot be avoided. #2 In both of these instances it could be—just as in the comical, in contrast to the joke—a case of the fulfillment of preconscious wishes (albeit ones that have perhaps been strengthened by the unconscious).3
There are, however, also anxious or horrible daydreams about whose meaning the preconscious can give no clarification. These can be explained only by means of strict dream analysis, and they then prove to be concealed realizations of repressed—therefore unconscious—wishes. (I mention for example an earthquake fantasy which I had in the Museo delle Terme;4 it concealed selfish but completely unconscious wishes which could have been realized by an earthquake in the museum.)
Displacement, condensation, plays the same role in all fantasies of the latter sort as it does in night-dreams. With regard to indirect presentation, I found a differenc