"Novalis, one of the young geniuses, said that 'the world becomes a dream, and the dream becomes reality.'" He wrote a novel called Heinrich von Ofterdingen set in Medieval times. It was unfinished when he died in 1801, but it was nevertheless a very significant novel. It tells of the young Heinrich who is searching for the "blue flower" that he saw in a dream and has yearned for ever since. The English Romantic poet Coleridge expressed the same idea; saying something like this:
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
"How pretty!"