This is perhaps the unconscious writing of which Freud speaks in the Note on the Mystic Writing Pad, as a writing which erases and retains itself; although Freud speaks of this writing after having warned, in The Interpretation of Dreams, against metaphorizing the unconscious as an original text subsisting alongside the Umschrift (transcription), and after having compared dreams, in a short text from to a system of writing and even of hieroglyphic writing, rather than to a language.