such were the images which paraded before my eyes

the realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, - not the material of my every-day existence - but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

edgar allan poe - berenice - a tale - 1835


here began for me what i shall call the overflow of dream into real life. from this point on, everything at times took on a double aspect - without, however, my reasoning powers thereby ever lacking in logic and without my memory loosing the least detail of what was happening to me.

gérard de nerval - aurélia - 1855


balzac much admired this sublime leap of imagination which soared across intervening reality and arrived directly at the object of fantasy, regardless of all difficulties of time or place..... it was simply the intensity with which he (nerval) projected the dream, the power he had to create something beyond the limits of time or actuality; it was, so to speak, an almost tangible vision, and it was eventually to find its conclusion in his pathological hallucinations.

théophile gautier - the poet (on gérard de nerval) - 1867

(gérard de nerval - image, title)

the sublunar light with its softened colours

at times octavian even imagined he could see indistinct human forms flitting among the shadows, but they dissolved the moment they passed into the moonlit parts of the street. low whispering and indefinite murmurs drifted upon the silence. the solitary visitor at first attributed them to some nervous flicker of the eye, some tingling in his ears. or perhaps they were merely a trick of the light, the breath of the sea breeze, or the slither of a lizard or grass-snake through the nettles. for in the natural world, everything is alive, even inanimate matter; and everything has a sound, even silence.

théophile gautier - the tourist from my fantomes - nyrb - 2008
roman polanski - tess - 1979
cinematography by ghislain cloquet and geoffrey unsworth