Condensation (n.) is Freud's term for one dream figure that stands for several people or ideas at once, as a dreamed Pope stood for the celibate dreamer, a polygamous sheikh and two women he admired.
Condensation (n.) fuses several ideas into one blurred dream-image, like Galton's superimposed family photographs; the dream knows no "either-or," only "and."
Condensation (n.) can fuse two faces because they share one feature: in Freud's dream the town doctor of his infancy merged with a schoolmaster — both, it turned out, were one-eyed.
Condensation (n.) makes the dream figure a composite: the patient in the dream proves to be her friend, a governess with false teeth, and the dreamer's own wife — all of them women who would resist treatment.
Condensation (n.) makes dreams brief, meagre and laconic beside the wealth of their thoughts — half a page of dream, a dozen pages of analysis.
Condensation (n.) builds a composite figure precisely to avoid representing what its members have in common — and the indifferent shared trait it shows points to a far from indifferent one concealed.
Condensation (n.) at its purest: a dream with nothing superfluous in it, in which every word was a symbol.
Condensation (n.) turns every psychical connection into sensory intensity, until the force of a whole train of thought is packed into a single image.
Condensation (n.) is the dream's heavy type — the important word printed bold, spoken loud and slow.
Condensation (n.) works like Galton's family photographs: it lays images over one another so the common feature stands out and the contradictions wipe each other out.
Condensation (n.) makes the dream's chimera, like the beasts of Oriental folk-imagination, except that dreams invent fresh ones every night in inexhaustible variety.
Condensation (n.) is translation done backwards: where a translator keeps similar things apart, the dream-work hunts, like a joke, for one ambiguous word to hold two thoughts.
Condensation (n.) is the first technique of wit: two words pressed into one, the suppressed half surviving inside the composite as a substitute.
Condensation (n.) can look like a flaw of composition in a painting, as when two figures fuse like badly condensed dream-figures, yet analysis finds its secret meaning.