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In this paper the author, starting from Primo Levi’s dream concerning his experience in Auschwitz, questions the Freudian theory of dreams, which, unlike Popper, he considers refutable. He believes that Freud’s theory as a whole is grounded on one basic assumption: that die Lust (both desire and pleasure) is the essence of human beings, so that all aspects of their life—dreams included—express this essence. The author, citing some of Freud’s writings as well as some artistic and literary examples ( Et in Arcadia Ego paintings, Kafka’s Metamorphosis), tries to show in which sense human beings’ apparent search for suffering binds them to reality, and thus to an acknowledgement of their own death—which implies that the unconscious is not simply the effect of a pleasure-seeking machine, but it also expresses a human tendency toward reality.