Fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.

Yuval Noah Harari
About This Quote

In Greek mythology, the god of dreams is called Hypnos. In Greek mythology, he is the god of sleep and the god of dreams. It was believed that if a person died in their sleep, they would die a second death, a different kind of death with a different kind of dream. There are many references to this in Shakespeare's works.

In “King Lear,” for example, King Lear’s daughters each have their own interpretation of what happens to him after he loses his senses—Goneril thinks he dies; Regan thinks he’s imprisoned; and Cordelia thinks he goes mad. But Cordelia’s idea clearly has more appeal than Regan’s or Goneril’s because Lear later asks whether she believes that her father is still alive. Cordelia doesn’t believe that her father is dead at all; she only thinks that his madness has changed him into someone unrecognizable to her.

She says that she believes that her father will “come again to himself”—that is, she believes that her father will come back to his senses and be the same man she remembers. To paraphrase this line from Cordelia: fantasy gives meaning to our suffering.

Source: Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow

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