Success Quote by Emile M. Cioran

Sleep becomes Cioran's most democratic drug: a nightly jailbreak available to anyone with a body, not a résumé. The line flatters us - "we are all geniuses when we dream" - then undercuts the compliment with a slyly corrosive punch. Dreaming is genius without stakes, brilliance without proof, art without audience. It is the only realm where talent can't be audited, where the butcher doesn't have to apologize for not being the poet. Equality arrives not through justice but through unconsciousness, which is exactly Cioran's kind of joke: emancipation as anesthesia.

The subtext is a critique of waking hierarchies and the vanity that sustains them. In daylight, the poet's prestige depends on institutions: taste-makers, education, cultural capital, the myth of "gift". In sleep, those scaffolds vanish. Everyone gets the same raw material - absurd images, sudden metaphors, impossible leaps. If that's "genius", it suggests genius may be less a sacred essence than a temporary suspension of reason's policing. Cioran isn't romanticizing the dream so much as cheapening our grand categories. If the butcher can be the poet in a dream, maybe the poet isn't so exceptional; maybe distinction is mostly a social arrangement.

Context matters: Cioran's work circles insomnia, despair, and the suspicion that consciousness is a burden. Here, sleep is both refuge and indictment. The escape is real, but it's also an admission that our most egalitarian utopia lasts only as long as we are not awake to ruin it.