ABSTRACT
There are the following states that need to be distinguished:
genuine ‘dream’, but carried on with the analyst for fear of annihilation if ‘dreamt’ elsewhere (this is an attempt to make a current emotional experience available for dream-thought and conscious thought; it is a definite and desperate attempt to make external reality and internal psychic reality available to thought, and therefore to usher in an ability to learn from experience);
hallucination of a dream, forced by the inability to dream and incapable of yielding associations (no associations, as with hallucinating the breast that yields no milk; starvation of reality means there is nothing to set against phantasy);
artefact; a try-out but inevitably failing to yield associations of any value or reassurance against the dread of hallucination, the superego and annihilation (related to fear of annihilation);
confusion due to excessive projective identification (not relevant to this situation).
