Download or read book The Rhetoric of Dreams written by Bert O. States and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.