Psychic finalism, understood as perspective, project, or future-oriented life, is a general Adlerian psychodynamic principle. It operates on a conscious and on an unconscious level, in an explicit and in an implicit way, in daily life as well as in dreams; it is always seen in reference to the indi-vidual history and within a specific social and cultural context. Based on these theoretical indications, in this article: 1) psychic finalism is placed in an evolutionary perspective; 2) some clinical cases are presented in which the dream’s finalism is expressed in a meaningful way; 3) it is hy-pothesized that the dream - and in a wider terms what could be defined the "fantastic-oneiric" capacity of the human being - colors psychic life with a catalyst function, both in art (as in Nietzsche’s aesthetic perspective) and in the art of living (as in Adler’s psychodynamic and psycho-therapeutic perspectives). However, dreams today are still an enigmatic product of psychic life, and if we think at their emergence in the course of evolution we can only make some heuristic hypotheses on the reason why they have been selected and maintained, and on the anthropological meaning of their manifestation; at any rate, dreams are still a precious gift within a psychodynam-ic therapy because they surely tell something about the patient’s mental life that we should inves-tigate.
Keywords: Psychic finalism; Prospective dreams; Evolutionism; Art of living; Alfred Ad-ler