A Small Gleaning Factory: Dream Workers

My friend and I are thinking of writing a novel together. She's has written a few things, in the science fiction genre, a genre I know nothing about. We're thinking that it's going to be somewhat sci-fi like Never Let Me Go or The Handmaid's Tale. In fact, the plot that we've devised so far sounds too much like Ishiguro's novel! Our recent conversations reminded me of this passage:

"But we've yet to explain how dreams keep the unconscious from causing too great a disturbance. In attempting to do so, it's helpful to make use of yet another metaphor, this time from The Interpretation of Dreams itself. The metaphor is instructive because it points to the affinity of dreams to written language. Dreams, said Freud, like the press under an autocratic regime, are the outcome of a compromise between the reporters of the unconscious and the censor, who monitors and edits the material submitted. But as writers in such regimes have discovered, there are ways of getting around censorship: 'for instance, he may describe a dispute between two Mandarins in the Middle Kingdom, when the people he has in mind are officials in his own country' (SE 4, p. 142). Like censored writers, dreams labour under the double imperative to reveal and to conceal their own meanings. They are not intrinsically 'witty and ingenious', as the footnote to our present passage states, but rather 'forced into becoming so' by the fact that, 'the direct and easiest pathways to the expression of their thoughts is barred'. Freud's coinage for this forced wit and ingenuity--the 'dream-work' (Traumarbeit)--is very precise: in the absence of a direct and easy pathways to satisfaction, dreams are forced to work, to weave painstaking disguises and make labyrinthine detours. They displace and condense meanings, forge a system of oblique verbal and visual representation to substitute for the more exact vocabulary and syntax of our waking language. Freud noted, for example, that dreams possess no means of representing 'either/or' (in this regard they of course bear the mark of their unconscious sources) other than as vagueness (auditory or visual). That which the waking mind represents as similar, the dreaming mind represents as unified, whilst what we consciously perceive as a logical relation between two entities is figured by the dream by means of simultaneity in time. Painful affects or emotions whose direct expression meet with the censor's marker pen are reversed, as in the dream Freud records in which an elderly gentleman registers his morbid sadness at his impeding death, as 'unrestrained laughter

A Small Gleaning Factory: Dream Workers