The difference between suppressing a desire and repressing it is that suppression is done consciously and repression is done unconsciously. Neither suppression nor repression, however, is a satisfactory solution to a personal problem. Both result in an inflated super-ego {conscience} and a more troublesome shackled and frustrated id {instinctive drives}.

By looking at your dream carefully and, above all, honestly, you can get to know what repressed desires you are carrying around with you. And that puts you into a position to work out for yourself a strategy which will allow these desires satisfaction and fulfillment in ways that will enhance your well-being and happiness and restore peace and harmony to your psyche.

An unbridled satisfying of each and every desire is likely to play havoc with the psyche, pulling it in all directions and destroying harmony and peace, and reducing rather than enhancing your happiness, as well as seriously damaging your effectiveness. Such a complete lack of control usually goes hand in hand with a complete ignorance of what forces are at work in one's unconscious depths. Sooner or later what is repressed will insist on having an outlet, and if there is no knowledge and therefore no rational control of what has been repressed, the latter may take possession of the psyche, destroying what is good and beautiful in it and almost inevitably doing hurt to other people, too.

Understanding your dreams, therefore, is a duty you owe both to yourself and your fellow human beings.

If you are doing the strangling, it probably means you are not allowing some part of yourself to express or fulfill itself. If you are being strangled, there is probably something in your life that is denying you the fulfillment and satisfaction you want or need.