According to Freud, dreams are forms of wish fulfillment, a sort of conflict resolution through subconscious processing of past and present troubles. Freud reasoned that the thoughts of the unconscious mind, being unruly and disturbing, were censored by the preconscious mind preventing them from passing unaltered into the conscious mind. He argued that dreams were the mechanism whereby the thoughts of the unconscious mind passed through the preconscious to the conscious mind in an altered state and thus required interpretation through psychoanalysis.