Success Quote by Bill Watterson

Watterson slips a devastating idea into the soft pajamas of childhood: dreams as a workaround for separation. The line is tender on its face, but it carries the particular Calvin and Hobbes magic trick of making play feel like philosophy. “I think” matters here. It’s not a doctrine, it’s a kid reasoning out loud, building a cosmology from emotional necessity. That tentative voice is the engine of the quote’s charm and its sting: it’s wishful, lucid, and a little doomed all at once.

The intent isn’t to define dreaming scientifically; it’s to dignify longing. Watterson frames absence as the real antagonist, not distance itself. “Apart so long” telescopes a child’s time sense - an afternoon can feel like exile - and makes the bedtime border between together and alone feel political, like a rule imposed from outside. Dreams become a contraband meeting place, a private jurisdiction where the world’s separations can’t enforce themselves.

Subtextually, it’s also Watterson defending imagination against the adult insistence on “real.” Calvin’s idea turns the intangible into a shared space with agency: if we’re in each other’s dreams, “we can play together all night.” Play isn’t a distraction; it’s companionship, continuity, survival. In the context of a strip that constantly interrogates growing up, this reads like a protest against the way adulthood narrows possibility. You can almost hear the quiet dread underneath the sweetness: morning is coming, and the laws of waking life will reassert themselves.