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Kern draws attention in this article to a phenomenon he noted on occasion in which unusual visual images occur in the mind of the analyst, while listening to his patients, as he endeavors to become empathically in tune with their productions. These visual accompaniments at first yield no clues as to their origin. Subsequent introspection by the analyst reveals, however, that these images are reflections of hitherto unsuspected countertransference feelings. In one of the examples Kern offers, a particular image was evoked by a patient with severe examination anxiety. While this patient was describing certain hostile or insensitive acts on the part of his parents — of which he had been the “victim” during childhood, Kern began to envision a bleak, somewhat shabby and “motionless” house. Analysis of this seemingly irrelevant bit of visual “noise” led the author to the recollection of several incidents in his own childhood when he had been terrorized by bullies. This recognition helped restore empathic relatedness between himself and his patient, allowing an otherwise stalemated analytic process to go forward. These “waking screen” phenomena appear to be related, as Kern mentions, not only to the issue of empathy, but to the whole subject of unconscious communication between analyst and analysand. Included in this broad realm are transference/countertransference dynamics and various dreamlike processes operating during the waking state.