Zangrilli Quirino 6/12/2011 The Mystery of Dreams psicoanalisi.it/psicoanalisi/1395 During his existence, the human being passes more than 20 years sleeping and 4 years dreaming. This, if we intend as dreaming the REM phase (rapid eye movement, which characterises one of the most active stages of the dream-sleep state) but later we will see how things are slightly different. We pass, therefore, at least a third of our lives sleeping and most of the time we do not retain any memory of our nocturnal periplus. Probably, thanks to this massive repression the oneiric activity has been relegated for thousands of years to the irrational and animistic kingdom. The historical merit of having assigned in a definitive manner a psychological meaning to the dream can be attributed to Freud and his studies. The psychoanalytic studies tell us that the Id animates desires which find their hallucinatory realisation in dreams. But these desires, sentiments and thoughts are anguishing for the conscious Ego. Even so, our sleep is not perturbed by this because the so- called Censorship which camouflages, masks and elaborates the latent messages of the unconscious, intervenes on them transforming them into manifest images, tolerable by the consciousness (manifest content of the dream) in the rapid passage between sleep and wake. It is for this simple reason that our dreams often seem to us abstruse and incomprehensible. The psychoanalytic definition of Dreams which the novice psychoanalyst learns since the dawning of his professional formation is therefore the following: “The dream is the camouflaged fulfilment of an unconscious desire of infantile origin”. In this definition is the entire psychoanalysis, its epistemology, its clinical effectiveness and its vision of the human being. Let’s examine this microscopically. “Camouflaged fulfilment” For a long time it was believed that the fulfilment of infantile desires contained in dreams, only happened through hallucinations but especially the studies of the micropsychoanalytic schooling have demonstrated that things go well further than what was hypothesised. We go as far as to say that life is an acted-out dream and as always, it is the borderline cases which reveal the basic mechanisms of the human psychism. An emblematic case regarding this is that of a borderline patient with a paranoiac structure of the personality. The man, who we will call Hansel, is in truth, a young giant man who, in the last ten years, has travelled back and forth between various psychiatric institutes in his region of residence, treated with massive doses of antipsychotic drugs and with a substantial cycle of electroshock-therapy. A borderline case, as is usually defined by colleagues . As “extrema ratio” (last remedy) he decided to undergo an intensive psychoanalysis which would finally permit him to live, enormously redimensioning the heavy pharmacological therapy, a fact which punctually happened. Hansel resided in a different city from myself and, after having travelled for months in order to have his sessions, he accepted to stay in my home town for a month. This situation often produces the following effects: it unbinds the patient from the family container and enucleates 1/10