The Dreamer

The scriptural dreamer of dreams — sheaves and stars bowing in visions he cannot help announcing. His gift for the symbolic and the not-yet-real, interpreting Pharaoh's dreams of famine and plenty, ends up steering a kingdom.

Sees the invisible essentials that adults have stopped seeing — the elephant inside the boa, the uniqueness of one rose among thousands. Poetic, boundless and believing, he treats the intangible as the most real thing there is.

Comfortable with the unknown and the irrational — she sees thestrals others cannot, believes in creatures no one else will, and is entirely unembarrassed by any of it. Her serene, imaginal way of seeing repeatedly steadies characters the rational world has failed.

Imagination transfigures ordinary Montmartre — she narrates strangers' inner lives, stages tiny enchantments and orchestrates invisible acts of kindness like works of art. The film's whole grammar is her inner world made visible.

Visionary and mystic who reported seeing angels in a Peckham tree and painted what he saw — symbols, infinity and the transcendent, engraved and hand-coloured. To see a world in a grain of sand is the Dreamer's manifesto in one line.

Painted inner vision over literal appearance — the night sky as swirling, ecstatic symbol rather than record. Spiritual intensity, believing against all evidence of recognition, and an imagination that has since reshaped how everyone sees.

Builds dream-logic worlds — the bathhouse of Spirited Away, the forest spirits of Totoro — where the invisible is treated as matter-of-fact. His films hold paradox and emergence without explaining them away, which is the Dreamer's discipline.

Imagination overriding reality entirely: windmills become giants, inns become castles, a farm girl becomes a peerless lady. Cervantes both mocks and honours the dream — the book's lasting power is that the vision is more generous than the world.

Too much: unrealistic, fantastical, ungrounded, castles in the air — the imaginal so strong it replaces the real.

Lives inside heroic daydreams — surgeon, pilot, condemned man facing the firing squad — while his actual errands pass in a fog. The imagination is vivid, but it functions as escape rather than creation.

Too much: escapist, ungrounded, head in the clouds — dreaming as a substitute for living rather than a source for it.

Facts alone are wanted in life — he schools children to define a horse by its teeth and never to wonder. Dickens then shows the system failing Gradgrind's own children, starved of everything the Dreamer supplies.

Too little: unimaginative, dry, 'if I can't measure it, it's not real' — the measurable mistaken for the whole of reality.