Abstract: Alexandre Dumas’s work contains many romantic scenarios in which his characters escape from their duties in dreams. But “all dreams are lies,” that is, illusions. A whole poetics arises from the fictions, where sometimes the dream is a daydream, leading the reader down the path of philosophical thought, and sometimes it is a dream provoked by a powerful narcotic that takes the heroes into transfigured worlds. And sometimes the dream becomes an unspeakable nightmare that unfolds over the page the novelist is writing.
