Round the World in Any Number of Days

Sometimes in dreams the fancy creates a composite, colored photograph of a town, a place, or a house. The dreamer notices the different of the component parts, but accepts the whole as correct... So it was to a certain degree with my impression of Melbourne. I saw it as a huge city in the Midlands of England, or the Five Towns, but the buildings were more perpendicular, the streets more rectangular, all was larger and more symmetrical, and there was a multitude of tramcars.

But these large, tall, black, square buildings were set in a soft, tepid, luminous air: pearly pink and gray...unlike anything in modern Europe - a dreamlike contrast.

When the fancy creates a place it forgets the necessary changes in background: air, sky and light. This is true of dreams.....

- Maurice Baring, Round the World in Any Number of Days (1913)