The technique is exactly the same in both cases.
Actual sensations are transformed into delusions closely associated with the dreamer’s or the neurotic’s complexes.
People subject to hallucinations project outside of their body symbolic figures representing wishes they have endeavoured to repress and which they refuse to recognize as a part of their personality.
They hear voices which say certain things they are trying not to think of, for they consider such thoughts as obscene, criminal or otherwise unjustifiable.
Dreamers likewise represent their disabilities as something entirely separate from their bodies and their personality.
The stammering patient dreaming that he was delivering a very eloquent speech but was interrupted by howling hoodlums, repressed out of consciousness the idea of his speech disturbance and gratified his ego by saying: “But for those hoodlums I could speak very well.”
Trumbull Ladd suffering from inflammation of the eyelids dreamt that he was trying to decipher a book in microscopic type: An attempt at shifting upon the book the responsibility for his difficulties in reading. The dream said: “There is nothing wrong with your eyes, but the type is too small.”
A young woman struggling with an unjustifiable attachment for a married man told me the following dream:
“I was surrounded by little devils carrying pitchforks. I was afraid of them at first, but I finally grabbed them all in a bunch and dropped them into the fireplace. A pit opened under them and closed again and I felt free.”
Her psychology was the same psychology which in the Middle Ages caused religious people to invent the devil. Her desires which she refused to recognize as hers were little devils endeavouring to tempt her. We deal more easily with a stranger than with ourselves and “the devil tempted me” sounds more forgivable than “I did what I had always wanted to do.”