This one sentence from Arthur Schopenhauer intrigues me:

*Our hesitation before such a colossal thought will perhaps be diminished
by the recollection... that the ultimate dreamer of the vast life-dream is
finally, in a certain sense, but one, namely the Will to Live, and that the
multiplicity of appearances follows from the conditioning effects of time
and space [the morphogenetic field whereby the Will to Live assumes forms].
It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all
the dream characters dream too.  *
--Arthur Schopenhauer, "Transcendental Speculation on Apparent Design in
the Fate of the Individual,” "  (1851)

(More about that:
https://harpers.org/2012/02/schopenhauer-causality-and-synchronicity/ )

 It reminds me of the great conclusion of #44, The Mysterious Stranger
which we all know:

"... "It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no
universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a
dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are
but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought,
wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

(Actually, the whole of that last, concluding Chapter)


I recall that SLC told a correspondent he had never read Nietzsche; but we
also know that he could get by, reading German, and was in Germany quite a
bit in the 1890's, when such ideas were in the air there.

Any thoughts? Maybe they both got it from Shakespeare. Ideas float around,
expression is everything.

DDD