Notes, References, and Acknowledgements

These dreams were mostly written in the summer of 2020 and the spring of 2021, with final revisions and alterations made in the winter of 2022/2023.

In writing them, alongside the obvious fairy tale and folkloric inspirations for many of the individual dreams, I was inspired by the collected dreams of Sultan Murad III, 12th ruler of the Ottoman Empire (as translated and presented by Ozgan Felek at The Sultan’s Dreams Project); the short stories The Dream Of The Butterfly, by Zhang Zhou, and The Infinite Dream Of Pao-Yu, by Ts’ao Hsueh Ch’in; the wonderful art of Frances MacDonald and Virginia Frances Sterrett (both of whom deserve to be much more widely known); the novels The Blind Owl, by Sedegh Hedayat, and The Affirmation, by Christopher Priest; and the film Waking Life, written and directed by Richard Linklater.

The phrase “last night as I slept, I dreamt” can be found in the poem Last Night As I Was Sleeping by Antonio Machado; while the phrase “the dust of the world still clings to me” in The Hundred And Thirty Ninth Dream is taken from The Records Of A Weather-Exposed Skeleton by Bashō.

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Illustrations

The illustrations used here are all in the public domain. They were largely sourced from oldbookillustrations.com and wikipedia.

The Dreams Of The Waiting Prince (book cover): Ill Omen, by Frances MacDonald (1893); The Dreams Of The Waiting Prince (front page): The Sleeping Princess, by Frances MacDonald (1910); The First Dream: They Walked Side By Side, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920); The Eleventh Dream: A Tree Of Marvellous Beauty, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920); The Twenty Fifth Dream: The Night In The Forest, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920); The Thirty Third Dream: The Voyagers Examined The Web Of Cloth, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1921); The Fortieth Dream: At Last In My Domain, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920); The Fifty Eighth Dream: What Is It?, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1921); The Seventy Fifth and Seventy Sixth Dreams: Spring, by Frances MacDonald (1905); The Eighty Ninth Dream: Europa And The Bull, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1921); The Hundred And Sixth Dream: Her Arms Around Bonne-Biche, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920); The Hundred And Eleventh Dream: A Great Many Beautiful Shells, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1921); The Hundred And Eighteenth Dream: I Shall Not Touch It, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1921); The Hundred And Thirty Eighth Dream: Passing Through The Forest, by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920); The Hundred And Fiftieth Dream: They Walked Side By Side (reversed), by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920); Notes, References, And Acknowledgements: The Sleeping Princess (reversed), by Frances MacDonald (1910); A List Of Dreams: The Sleeping Princess, by Frances MacDonald (1895).