From dreams to nightmares in the work of Alexandre Dumas, or “All dreams are lies”

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.