Beginning of Essay
The purpose of dreams is to sleep. Dreams also represent wish fulfillment. A dream is the result of a mediation or compromise between these two opposing forces. Freud defines the manifest content of dreams as that which an individual is dreaming in a particular dr ....

Middle of Essay
.... This intervening mechanism Freud called the dream-work. The dream-work is continuously at work during an individual's sleep process. It is constantly preventing unconscious wishes, anxieties and impulses from infiltrating consciousness, or only permitting them to appear in the manifest dream in a distorted form. It follows from this that these latent wishes are unacceptable to consciousness, since they would challenge the individuals consciously-avowed sensibilities (customary, moral or otherwise) to the point that they would threaten the very purpose of the dream, namely the preservation of sleep. In other words, the dream-work acts as a censor, ....