Dreams

Dreams is a collection of short pieces published in 1890 by the South African writer Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), her second work after The Story of an African Farm. It consists of eleven short pieces that echo one another but are not strictly connected; the author said each came from one of her dreams, so they read more like prose poems or narrative paintings than conventional plotted fiction. The work inherits the medieval tradition of dream visions while carrying a distinctly modern quality: condensed language, restrained imagery, and an allegorical approach to the relationship between the creator and society, individual freedom and collective discipline, desire and renunciation. The settings move among the African veld, the streets of industrial London, and olive-covered hillsides in Italy, so the vision is not confined to one region. Schreiner long engaged with questions of gender, class, race, and nation, and these concerns surface obliquely in this book as symbol and allegory, making her an important voice for later studies of women's writing and socialist thought. According to researchers, the book was popular among British suffragettes in the early twentieth century, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman mentioned its influence on her own early decision for independence. A short work that resists existing genres, Dreams is often seen as a key entry point for understanding Schreiner's thought and late Victorian English prose.