A Dream (n.) can only be described by contrasts that sharpen into contradictions: it is hermetically sealed off from real life by an impassable gulf, and yet it can never get free of the real world.
A Dream (n.) can send a patriot, born after Napoleon died, on a sea-voyage to St. Helena to sell the ex-Emperor a bargain in Moselle wine — an alien life inserted between two consistent sections of the real one.
A Dream (n.) at its most sublime and at its most ridiculous alike must borrow every brick from what we have already experienced, outwardly or inwardly.
A Dream (n.) will tear its own cobweb: one alarm-clock becomes a village church bell, then sleigh bells, then a kitchen-maid's tower of plates crashing at the threshold.
A Dream (n.) pictures earthly beauty in heavenly splendour, shows our everyday fears in their ghastliest shape, and turns our amusement into jokes of indescribable pungency — so that waking, we feel the real world has never offered its equal.
A Dream (n.) can both sink below the level of humanity and rise to a virtuosity — tenderness, clarity, wit — that we never command when awake.
A Dream (n.) is as pure as the life: the purer the life the purer the dream, the more impure the one the more impure the other.
A Dream (n.) invents no sin; it merely dramatizes the Apostle's words, 'Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer', spinning out an impulse that passed through the waking mind.
A Dream (n.) can warn of moral infirmity just as physicians admit it can warn of hidden illness.