Like Mathematics, like Contemplation, like 'Nonsense', Dream occupies a mental sphere of its own; and the debt owed to it by poetry, by all imaginative literature, is beyond computation. A poem may reveal its influence in essence or in tincture. (...) Fiction, too, no less than poetry differs widely in the degree in which the elements of dream have affected its conception and making. (...) An imagined 'character' makes his appearance in consciousness no less of his own volition as it were and no less complete than any similar apparition made manifest in a dream.
Walter de la Mare, 'Dream and Imagination', Behold, This Dreamer! (1939)
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