Success Quote by Hugo Pratt

Pratt’s line has the snap of a warning whispered in a smoky bar: the most volatile people aren’t the sleepy fantasists but the lucid ones, the day-dreamers who keep moving. “Dreaming with his eyes open” takes imagination out of the pillow realm and puts it on the street, where it can start rearranging reality. That’s the compliment hidden inside the caution. Open-eyed dreaming is creative power with traction: the ability to impose a private vision onto public space.

The sting is in the second clause: “dangerous… for they do not know when their dreams come to an end.” Pratt isn’t moralizing about fantasy; he’s diagnosing a boundary problem. The danger isn’t simply ambition, it’s the loss of an off-switch. When a dreamer can’t recognize the moment the dream has stopped being guiding myth and started being excuse, everything becomes negotiable: other people’s autonomy, collateral damage, even basic facts. That’s how idealism curdles into fanaticism, and how charisma turns predatory. The line sketches the psychology of the revolutionary and the con artist with the same pen stroke.

Coming from a cartoonist, the quote also reads like a sly meta-comment on storytelling itself. Comics are literally open-eyed dreaming: images that teach the reader’s waking mind to hallucinate motion, consequence, destiny between panels. Pratt, best known for the drifting, ambiguous adventures of Corto Maltese, understood that romantic myth is a propulsion system. He also knew myth can become a trap when you mistake narrative momentum for moral permission.