"It may be that "dreaming," too, should be understood this way, as sustaining the objectifying power of people during hours when they are cut off from the natural source of objects, so that they do not during sleep drown in their own corporeal engulfment. That is, the particular content of dreams (now terrifying, now benign; now full of uncanny secret intelligence about the sleeper, now ignorant, arbitrary, and nonsensical) is itself insignificant beside the overall fact of the dreaming itself, the emergency work of the imagination to provide an object - this object, that object, any object - to sustain and to exercise the capacity for self-objectification during the sleep-filled hours of sweet and dangerous bodily absorption."
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Original Language: English
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Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dreams
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Dreams
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