Dreams and Censorship

Freud thought that in the same way that sleeping weakens our reality testing and reasoning, it also weakens, but does not entirely eliminate, our ability to repress forbidden impulses. These impulses unconscious during waking life, are given partial, distorted expression during dreaming. This is where dreams get their symbolism. We can think here of a certain kind of psychical energy, the currency of our emotional investments,. slipping along the associative chain from one image to another, from father to bear.