Success Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon turns an apparently small deficiency into a quiet social exile. The line isn’t really about dreaming; it’s about membership. “For years” stretches the absence into a lived identity, a long apprenticeship in feeling defective. Then he lands the knife with “I felt left out,” plain language that refuses poetic distance. It reads like a confession you’d only make once you’ve decided it’s safe to sound needy.

The subtext is that dreaming isn’t just a neurological quirk in his world; it’s a cultural credential. Dreams are where people claim mystery, intimacy, even artistry. To “not dream” is to be denied an interior spectacle everyone else can trade stories about at breakfast, in therapy, in lovers’ beds. Sturgeon frames it as a “thing,” deliberately generic, which is what makes it sting: it’s not one specific talent you can compensate for, but the suspicion that you’re missing a basic human feature. The phrasing “Everybody else had” borrows the childish logic of exclusion (the playground, the lunch table) and smuggles it into adulthood, where we pretend comparison no longer matters.

Context sharpens the intent. As a science-fiction writer associated with the genre’s humanist turn, Sturgeon often wrote about outsiders and hidden differences: bodies that don’t fit, minds that don’t map to the norm. Here he flips the usual sci-fi premise. The alienation isn’t caused by extraordinary powers, but by the lack of a supposedly universal inner life. It’s a neat Sturgeon move: making the ordinary strange, and letting loneliness do the world-building.