Life & Wisdom Quote by Bram Stoker

Envy is doing the heavy lifting here, disguised as piety. Stoker opens with “How blessed” not to praise the well-rested but to underline a deprivation: the speaker is someone for whom night is not neutral. The line works because it treats sleep like a moral economy. For “some people,” rest arrives “nightly” as if on schedule, a dependable sacrament; for others, the same ritual becomes a trapdoor. The sweetness of “blessing” and “sweet dreams” isn’t just lyrical ornament - it’s bait, a deliberately innocent vocabulary that makes the lurking alternative (insomnia, dread, nightmare) feel even more predatory.

The subtext is Victorian, but not quaint. It taps an era obsessed with respectability, hygiene, and self-control while quietly admitting how little control anyone has over the mind after dark. “No fears, no dreads” reads like a checklist of what modernity promises - safety, order, rationality - and what gothic fiction exists to puncture. Stoker is pointing at a class of people who can afford ignorance: those whose lives have been arranged so thoroughly that even their unconscious is calm. That’s not just psychological; it’s social.

Contextually, Stoker’s gothic sensibility treats the night as a borderland where the suppressed returns. In Dracula, sleep is when the body is most available and the self most porous. This sentence is a soft-lit doorway into that terror: the true horror isn’t monsters, it’s the suspicion that “blessed” people are only blessed because they haven’t met what’s coming.