In this lively and provocative book, Bert O. States offers a new theory of the nature and function of dreaming, in the process challenging the Freudian theory of repression. The Rhetoric of Dreams asserts that the dream operates quite differently from the mechanism of repression as it is envisioned by most psychoanalysts. Far from censoring unacceptable thought, States says, the dream is one of the most direct of psychic functions, processing experience in patterns of association that contribute to our survival in waking reality. He thus regards the dream as a means by which the mind "thinks" images out of feelings and attitudes and then converts those images into other images along the path of the dream narrative.