Dreamer can find his way by moonlight

Oscar Wilde - "Yes I am a dreamer For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, sees the dawn before the rest of the world". This is a quotation from “The Critic as Artist” (p. 46), an assay in the form of a dialogue between Gilbert and Ernest, first published in the Fortnightly Review in February 1891. On the whole, Dorian Gray (1890) presented aestheticism in a negative way whereas the mentioned essay (including “The Soul of Man under Socialism”) gave it affirmation.

There are many ways to interpret the meaning of this, on way is to think that the dreamer sees the world in the diluted light of the moon. Instead of the bright, blinding light of the sun, and because of this, he is the first to see the reality through the mask of the lights and noises of day, and he is punished when he is confronted with the harshness of reality in comparison to his dream state.

“A dreamer” is a metaphor of an artist, who, psychologically, lives in a world of his dreams, thoughts and fantasies. As somebody, who is particularly exposed to the tension between the reality (“the down’) and his inner world, he is especially predisposed to see the future or the truth. But such an insight is not only his punishment but also “his reward,” as Gilbert - one line below - admits himself.

But Oscar Wilde is also rewriting one of the more famous quotes of Hegel: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." here Hegel means that understanding of history and its unfolding as it happens only after the event takes place. It is always already retrospective. For Oscar Wilde, the punishment referred to is not unlike that of Cassandra. She could foresee what was to come, but because of a curse no one would believe her. We know that dreamers as visionaries see ahead, but they are doomed to do so only before others and therefore are likely to be ignored in the light of day.

Oscar Wilde, always a prince of paradox, reverses expectations as a way of shocking or at least trying to startle us into the contradictions that make up our way of being in the world. I have little doubt that he is being somewhat conventional in making the connection between a dreamer and darkness since most of us sleep at night and therefore most dreams occur then. The dreamer, however, is not just a literal dreamer, but also a dreamer in its larger sense, of the visionary who sees before others. Ezra Pound put it more succinctly: “poets are the antennae of the race”.

We know that how a dreamer prefers to be in his own world that of night blues and has built a perfect reality around this, seeing only what fits in his dream. But eventually he comes to the end of his dream, and as the sun rises, a crashing realisation of the imperfection of reality falls upon him and he is faced with the truth that he had hidden behind the purity of his dream, and when, ultimately seeing and accepting this truth, he attempts to convey the world as he knows it to others, he is punished by the dismissals of those who walk through the day, blinded by the sun that shines upon them, and who dismiss him as a dreamer. He will never be able to share what he has witnessed.

One of the reasons it seems so elegant is the use of the language itself conveys the meaning, and when reading it you sense what he was trying to put across, without needing to fully comprehending it. Dreamers are always mysterious in way of their behaviours and when they are awake they try to live the dream by their own imaginations and of course find their ways by the moonlight they see in their dreamy world. Stay blessed! # kishoreshintre