My Year With Proust - Day 107

   "Doubtless, in such perfect coincidences as this, when reality folds back and overlays what we have long dreamed of, it completely hides it from us, merges with it, like two equal superimposed figures which appear to be one, whereas, to give our happiness its full meaning, we would rather preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them - and to be quite certain that it is indeed they - the distinction of being intangible.  And our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualize without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 578

Proust is immediately following up on his unexpected inroads with Gilberte's mother Odette.  He had dreamed of the possibility of visiting her Gilberte's house, making it into the inner circle, and suddenly it had become reality.  But immediately this brings up the problem of your reality being superimposed on your fondest dream.  This is what you want, right?  As we all know, reality never begins to reach the level of our wildest dreams - and if it has then you clearly never dreamed big enough in the first place.  Proust proposed, at least it seems to me that he proposed, that you really need your dream and your reality to continue to coexist in their entirety, to remain "separate points of our desire."  If the dream is too close to the reality then it reveals the paucity of your real experience.  Conversely, if the reality overshadows or superimposes or replaces the dream then we have lost something ethereal and beauty.  And then do we have to forge ahead and create an entirely different dream, almost a Hegelian dialect at work, which will draw us away from the reality that we were so certain that we wanted?