Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

Fiction is really often much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and it comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing factual, psychological, and moral understanding.

Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes....

What is life without incompatible realities?

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.