Dreams are the novels which we read when asleep

 

Notes from a Reading Life

“Dreams are the novels which we read when asleep,” according to an anonymous “writer” quoted by Charles G. Leland in the preface to his anthology The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams, published in Philadelphia in 1855. Perhaps the writer was Leland himself. It’s a curious anthology, originating in the ancient idea that prophecy and poetry are intimately connected; did not the Pythia speak in verse? Leland even finds room for a Bohemian drinking song, translated from “Czech-Slavonian” by himself:

Drink good beer and never fear, 
Love the girls both far and near!

He comes again and again to his beloved Chaucer and Chaucer’s ringing validation of dreams:

Dreames be significations 
As well of joy as of tribulations, 
That folks endure in this life present: 
There nedeth to make of this none argument

"A tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it."
- Tuscan proverb quoted by Italo Calvino in the introduction to his collection of Italian Folktales, which contains many wonder tales translated from Tuscan dialect, including "The Sleeping Queen" (La Regina Marmotta).,recorded from te oral narration of a laborer around 1880. The manner of the queen's awakening could keep Freudians and Jungians and anthropologists arguing for weeks. For Calvino it is enough to declare that "folktales are real". 
In the course of his journey into folklore, he tells us, "the world about me gradually took on the attributes of fairyland, where everything that happened was a spell or a metamorphosis...I had the impression that the lost rules which govern the world of folklore were tumbling out of the magic box I had opened."