In the clinical setting, Freud encouraged free association to the dream's manifest content, as recounted in the dream narrative, so as to facilitate interpretative work on its latent content – the repressed thoughts and fantasies – and also on the underlying mechanisms and structures operative in the dream-work. As Freud developed his theoretical work on dreams he went beyond his theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments to arrive at an emphasis on dreams as "nothing other than a particular form of thinking... It is the dream-work that creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming".