Idealization serves to enable the ego to deny feelings of hopelessness and emptiness arising from the withdrawal of cathexis from real external objects, and serves also to evade the necessity of resolving ambivalence, a necessary step if real objects are to be recathected. There is thus a close and complex interrelationship between idealization and withdrawal of cathexis from external reality. A potential hazard of pathological idealization is disillusionment and collapse of the defensive process involved. Illusion and disillusion, however, also play a part in normal processes of establishing external object relations. In two dreams examined in the paper, the moon represented an idealized internal object, and its falling out of the sky a catastrophic disillusionment of that object.