just like.. just like.. the abuse of imagination for self-hypnotic slumber

…Just as the child puffing along the street is imagining himself a steam
engine or a horse sometimes it seems mixing them into some mythological
monster, with a horse's mane behind its funnel and a tail hanging from a
coal bunker so the man for whom the child is the playful father is always
imagining himself to be something he is not-such as a bird, Napoleon, a
gentleman, a fish, or an adding machine. The principal thing that
discriminates men from the other animals is that they desire to escape
from themselves.

''The Politics of Artsitic Expression'', 1924