As fantastic and unbelievable reality may appear, it seems to me it has compelling qualities that exclude dreaming as an acceptable explanation, precluding liberation of uncivilized behaviors and objectification of other people.
I stalled out on Thomas Covenant because I couldn't hack the prose, honestly, but I believe I know the plot point to which you're referring. I'm with Lovecraft in thinking that 1784 Peter shouldn't have been able to shake off his experience of 1933 as lightly as the story seems to think (especially considering the effects of the same few days in the eighteenth century on his descendant—Lovecraft objected specifically that present-day Peter finds no reference to the exchange in any of his diaries when other alterations in history can be perceived), but I'm not sure if you're arguing the same or whether you just mean that the human mind when confronted with the impossible should opt for assuming madness over dream states. Probably it depends on the local definition of impossible. I'm thinking of a scene in Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980) in which a large red telepathic cat from the twenty-fifth century is explaining why she's safer running around an early nineteenth-century Polish shtetl in her own shape (it's a long story) rather than assuming the illusion of a human stranger "or a least a blackberry bush, make yourself inconspicuous"—"Espinoza, as a Solthree I must go on two legs and I get nowhere; in my own shape, if someone sees me—well, the people here believe in demons, and whatever they are, I am not far from what they look like—so they say, 'Oh, God help me, there goes a demon!' and shiver and say their prayers. If they see a blackberry bush running by in the street, they think they are going crazy and start screaming. Forget it!"
no subject
I stalled out on Thomas Covenant because I couldn't hack the prose, honestly, but I believe I know the plot point to which you're referring. I'm with Lovecraft in thinking that 1784 Peter shouldn't have been able to shake off his experience of 1933 as lightly as the story seems to think (especially considering the effects of the same few days in the eighteenth century on his descendant—Lovecraft objected specifically that present-day Peter finds no reference to the exchange in any of his diaries when other alterations in history can be perceived), but I'm not sure if you're arguing the same or whether you just mean that the human mind when confronted with the impossible should opt for assuming madness over dream states. Probably it depends on the local definition of impossible. I'm thinking of a scene in Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980) in which a large red telepathic cat from the twenty-fifth century is explaining why she's safer running around an early nineteenth-century Polish shtetl in her own shape (it's a long story) rather than assuming the illusion of a human stranger "or a least a blackberry bush, make yourself inconspicuous"—"Espinoza, as a Solthree I must go on two legs and I get nowhere; in my own shape, if someone sees me—well, the people here believe in demons, and whatever they are, I am not far from what they look like—so they say, 'Oh, God help me, there goes a demon!' and shiver and say their prayers. If they see a blackberry bush running by in the street, they think they are going crazy and start screaming. Forget it!"