waking dreams

The dreamer refracts his own life. The world lays so many alluring or dangerously intriguing images before him, he wishes he could reflect each of them, enrich it, fill it out and thereby set it in perspective. The brief exposure, like the glimpse of a stage set, of the apartment or the provincial home, allows him to inhibit each for a few seconds, even if his own taste is utterly different; 'I am sharing the life of that family', he likes to imagine, with a slight shudder, if the discussion they are having reveals values he himself has always reviled. To some degree, the parents of a dreamy child are right to worry that the child will lack character later on, in the generally understood sense of 'rounded character', since the dreamer prefers to be several people, live several lives, many of which have no more substance than a speck of a dust blown into the doorway of a house by a breath of wind. On the other hand, it is wrong to think of the dreamer as someone who turns away from the world, for very often his various lives actually give him a greater degree of empathy with it.

                               Ur Jealousy The Other Life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet.

The dreamer in her
Had fallen i love with me
and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her, and I knew it.

Ur Dreamers, Ted Hughes.