"From the desire to dream comes the thirst for and love of the cinema. For lack of the spontaneous adventure which our eyelids let escape on wakening, we go into the dark cinemas to find artificial dreams and perhaps the stimulus capable of peopling our empty nights. I would like a filmmaker to fall in love with this idea. On the morning after a nightmare, he notes down exactly everything that he remembers and reconstructs it in detail. It's not a question here of logic and classical construction...but of things seen, of a superior realism, since this opens into a new domain of poetry and dream" (Robert Desnos, 1923). Desnos might have been describing Dead of Night twenty years before it was made. This ghost story is rooted in that "superior realism" of which Desnos writes (as does Ado Kyrou, see Nosferatu, November 10). In a nightmare, an architect dreams that he is summoned to a villa whose occupants relate tales involving various psycho-mythical spectres (a selectively reflecting mirror, a ventriloquist possessed by his own dummy, etc.). By dead of day, Dead of Night reverses the "it was only a dream" formula.