When dealing with seriously ill patients, the oneiric functions are constantly invoked. What is involved is the entire dream spectrum, both in the forms that start from hallucination and pass through transformations in hallucinosis until they become rêveries and dreams (H→TH→R→D), and in the forms that start from undreamable dreams, also passing through interrupted dreams, until they reach the level where dream work is shared between patient and analyst.

The author takes the clinical case of Alice to describe this “journey beyond the farthest borders” of the mind. Having to face the severe emotional turbulences present in the field, the analyst becomes involved in a series of enactments, which culminate in a state of somato-psychic hallucinosis during a session. The difficult steps in working through this condition will bring the analytic couple into contact with the pain of separation, reactivated by the summer break, which up until that point had been impossible to deal with. This pain enters the relationship through the illness of the field brought on stage as it were by the hallucinosis of the analyst, who manages to set in motion a metabolic cycle by means of her oneiric functions.

The case of Alice offers the opportunity to consider hallucinosis from a binocular perspective, with one side looking towards psychosis and the other towards dream, that is to say as a conceptual bridge between pathology and physiology. The end point of hallucinosis will then be determined by the quality of the transformations which will be generated within hallucinosis itself and starting from it.