From its very birth, the seventh art was defined as "the dream factory", above all because of its association with the oneiric dimension. A film, in fact, allows us, through images, to build expectations within ourselves, and allows us to identify both with the story and with the characters.

Cesare Musatti, the celebrated psychoanalyst, argued that every film is a projective test of the director as well as the writers, who channel their fantasies through a découpage of images. Without venturing strictly into the realm of dynamic psychology, it can be said that cinema plays a therapeutic role because it introduces us to a spatial and temporal reality that partially compensates for our anxieties — it is like entering a "box" in which, for two hours, we forget tangible reality, work worries and everything else.

It is also true that in particularly sensitive individuals, identification with films can provoke strong emotions, even inducing tears or deep feeling, but it is necessary to distinguish how much of these emotions actually relates to one's personal life. It follows that the release helps us to draw out and express what we carry within. A film makes us smile, makes us daydream, makes us fall in love, and gives shape to our desires.

Detachment from the outside world also occurs through the place itself — the cinema hall — which acts as a form of closure, almost as if we were shutting our eyelids. Just like someone who is sleeping, the audience member needs a dark, darkened room in order to let go of the high level of attention that we inevitably have to sustain in real life.

There is undoubtedly an element of "awareness" that heightens the capacity for understanding, precisely because the viewer knows they are in a cinema and can therefore be defined as a waking dreamer who does not merely absorb through identification, but enriches themselves by extrapolating their own inner dynamics, thereby encouraging a pleasurable form of escapism.