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The human capacity to dream, both in sleep and in daytime reverie, can be seen as the activity of constructing a meaningful sequence that functions as a protective shield in relation to the traumatic nature of the real. The psychic skin produced by the dream is the mask of self-illusion/fiction, in the etymological sense of '˜to feign’ ('˜to form, shape, invent'), which makes it possible to become a person. In Latin, '˜persona’ literally means a mask. Accordingly, dreaming expresses a poetic capacity of the psyche. Like poetry, the dream text invariably seeks to rebuild a harmony between the body and the psyche, to restore body to the psyche or to re-establish the psyche in the body; in Winnicott’s terms, it aims to personalise, that is to advance the subjectivation process.