Freud says that dreams fulfill human wishes. What is it that I wish for that cannot be experienced while I am awake? What is about mydesire that renders it incompatible with reality? It is as if I can only experience mydesire in the dark.

The desires that Freud is referring to are the libidinal desires that flow between the genders and the generations. Libidinal desire contradicts itself, always and only ambivalent. Attraction is simultaneously repulsion; love is simultaneously fear. It is this ambivalence which the law will not allow in the light of day. The reality principle is the principle of contradiction; a real person cannot be ambivalent. Make up your mind. Do you love your father or do you want to kill him?

In the light of day it is either/or; you're either a good person or a bad person, or, a good person going bad or a bad person going good. A good person is rewarded and a bad person punished; that is how the law keeps them apart. The law does not allow that all the people be judged good, nor does it allow that all be judged bad. What the law demands is that one group of people play the part of good people, while another group of people play the part of bad people. The courtroom is the field of play, the stage upon which the agon is performed and a judgment made upon winners and losers.

The contest temporarily resolves the ambivalence of human fantasy. As long as the contest is on-going, my ambivalence is held at bay, resisted, repressed. For the judgement to be made the contest must come to an end. As the light of the law sinks over the western horizon and the dark returns, so does the ambivalence of mydesire.