"I'll Dream of You" by Charles F. Myers is a comic fantasy novella about Marc Pillsworth, a buttoned-up advertising executive whose orderly bachelor life is upended when a vivacious red-headed woman named Toffee literally materializes from his subconscious mind and takes up residence in his waking world. The story opens with Marc dreaming of Toffee, a bold, flirtatious, and wholly uninhibited young woman who pursues him with cheerful shamelessness while he retreats into his customary reserve. When Marc's alarm clock wakes him, Toffee wakes with him, having crossed from dream into physical reality. She explains that Marc's dreaming released her from his subconscious and gave her tangible form, and that she intends to stay and improve his life, whether he consents or not. She further informs him that she will vanish when he sleeps but reappear upon waking, making her effectively impossible to be rid of through any ordinary means. What follows is a rapid sequence of social catastrophes. Toffee scandalizes Marc's prim valet Joseph by posing provocatively in his bedroom. She creates a public spectacle outside a department store by changing clothes in a display window, drawing a crowd and requiring the intervention of a flustered saleswoman named Miss Clatt. At the Pillsworth Advertising Agency, she arrives wearing a black evening gown, introduces herself to the entire staff with theatrical warmth, and unsettles Marc's efficient and quietly beautiful secretary, Julie Mason, by hinting that Marc has entertained warm private thoughts about her. The complications deepen when Marc, hoping to satisfy Toffee's curiosity about city life, takes her to an upscale nightclub called the Spar Club. There, Toffee picks a furious quarrel with a socially prominent and physically imposing matron named Mrs. Claribel Housing, whom she accuses of poaching her dancing partner, the agency's layout artist Jack Snell. In the ensuing chaos, she upends a man's chair during his wedding anniversary toast, drenches his wife with champagne, and provokes a general brawl. The evening ends with Marc and Toffee arrested and brought before a bewildered judge, whose attempt to establish Toffee's parentage results only in bewilderment and, after Toffee pinches Marc hard enough to make him leap screaming toward the bench, in the judge fleeing under it in terror. Marc and Toffee spend the night in separate jail cells, though Toffee dematerializes from the women's wing and rematerializes above Marc in his cell. Marc devises a scheme by which Toffee, once he falls asleep, can materialize outside and steal the keys. When Marc cannot manage to fall asleep, Toffee solves the problem practically by knocking him unconscious with her shoe. She leaves a note for the judge explaining her origins in terms that only deepen his confusion, and the two return to Marc's apartment. Throughout this chaos runs a quieter current. Julie Mason, shaken by the sight of Toffee's freedom and vitality, arrives at Marc's apartment to resign, feeling obscurely that her professional life is closing off something essential in her. Marc, who has grown into real feeling for Julie over the course of these upheavals, persuades her to stay, and the two share a brief, candid moment of connection that amounts to the story's emotional turning point. Marc eventually deduces how Toffee came to exist and how she can be returned. He recalls that Welsh rarebit was the meal he ate the night she first appeared in his dreams, and recognizes that Toffee herself had playfully hinted at her origins by claiming that her father was a Welsh. He arranges a farewell dinner and makes a point of mentioning sleeping tablets, signaling to Toffee that he has understood. In a final dream sequence, the two walk together through a serene, misty countryside while Toffee explains that she was never entirely separate from Marc's own mind, and that she could only remain lovely as long as she served his genuine happiness rather than standing in its way. She tells him to be good to Julie, revealing that she knew from the beginning that Julie was the woman Marc truly needed. They share a tender goodbye, the dream bell rings, and Marc wakes to a clear morning with a sense of quiet loss quickly overtaken by purposeful warmth. Julie will be at the office. He does not want to be late. The story is a light, warmhearted romantic comedy built around the conceit that the idealized figures men conjure in fantasy are not alternatives to real emotional life but reflections of it, and that the road to genuine connection sometimes requires the disruptive, ungovernable energy that Toffee represents.
By Charles F. Myers · Genre: Romance, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction