Then I thought how realism and it's corollary, world-building, are anti-dream. In the same way that atheism is anti-religion. It seeks to oppose something by first redefining it as something that it isn't.
When I watch a film, or read a book and say dismissively, "That isn't plausible!" or "That would never happen in real life!", well, that's beside the point. I wouldn't say that about a dream. It's power doesn't lie in how close it is to reality.
The opposite of this is the modernist art-for-arts sake idea that we reveal the flatness of the painting's surface as an anti-realist, or anti-illusion, anti-mimetic technique. But this doesn't use the grammar of dream. It's not a dream language. The dream isn't entirely and only about the fact that it's not reality.
Surrealism sometimes gets close, but too often relies on stylistic techniques, e.g., placing random, unlikely objects next to each other. This happens in dream, but for a purpose.
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