Success Quote by Jean Cocteau

Dream logic doesn’t just suspend physics; it suspends judgment. Cocteau’s line nails the eerie emotional anesthesia of dreaming: the most radical dislocations register as normal. You move in with strangers, abandon your real attachments, and the mind offers no protest. That “nothing surprises us” is less an observation than an indictment of how easily consciousness can be re-scripted when the usual guardrails - memory, continuity, social accountability - drop away.

Cocteau, a director and poet of cultivated unreality, is speaking from inside an aesthetic project: modernism’s fascination with altered states, masks, and the self as performance. In his films (think the corridor-magic and mirrored thresholds of Orphee), the dream isn’t a soft refuge; it’s a system with its own bureaucracy. The unnerving part is our consent. “With no regret, we agree” turns the dream into a moral experiment: identity is shown to be less essence than habit. Cut the habits, remove the familiar witnesses who confirm who we are, and we adapt instantly - not heroically, but passively.

The subtext lands hard in the 20th-century context Cocteau lived through: mass persuasion, war, and ideological churn that made entire populations inhabit new “realities” with startling speed. Strangers become intimates; old loyalties are edited out. The quote works because it frames that drift as intimate, not political: a private surrender that feels frictionless while it’s happening. Cocteau’s warning isn’t that dreams are strange; it’s that humans are.