Tan Lin

“But even as she calls adult reality unreal, Alice, as the most reasonable creature in her unreasonable dreams, doesn’t quite yet realize that the adult’s sense of reality has already taken up residence in her. The principal dream of most children—the dream within the dream, as it were—is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult, the outlook is reversed. The adult’s quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms—and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult”