Some patients cannot sleep because they fear dreaming, and some cannot sleep because they fear not dreaming. Caïn suggests that the metapsychological analysis of these phenomena should rely on Kohut's concept of the self, in which the self is a theoretical concept at a low level of theorizing. It is not a system but a mental content with representations in the ego, superego, and id. The total decathexis occurring during sleep brings about a discontinuity, but one which permits a narcissistic restoration. Dreaming brings about the maintenance and intactness of the self and of a continuum in the individual's psychic life. A patient might fear going to sleep because the anxiety-provoking content of dreams threatens the destruction of the integrity of the self. On the other hand, the absence of any memory of dreams during sleep may be experienced as an emptiness which is also frightening, a discontinuity in the experience of the self. In either case the dream is a signal of anxiety, whether it brings about the anxiety, or whether, by its presence, it diminishes anxiety.