ABSTRACT
Dreaming, defined by Sigmund Freud as “The royal road to the unconscious”, is still a critical tool in the exploration of our patients’ emotional life and a specificity of analytic technique. The emotional content of both dreams is characterised by terror provoked by scary and torturing parental figures—instead of reassuring ones—and by the intense rag felt towards them. Dreaming is the final product of the activation of complex neural networks in several cognitive domains responsible for attention, memory, language in general, and sensorial perception and visual imagery. Neuroimaging techniques, during dreaming, show how the prototypical sensorimotor hallucinations, the hyper-emotionality, and the cognitive distortions are correlated with patterns of activations/deactivations of specific brain regions. The iconic language of dreams seems to be resistant, or resilient, to massive psychic trauma that is, verbally, by definition, “mute”, but not blind.
