Like Hoffman’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, in French the Fantaisies à la manière de Callot (“Fantasy pieces in the manner of Jacques Callot”), the fantasy pieces in Gaspard de la Nuit immerge the reader in an atmosphere of quotidian uncanniness full of poetry and dreamlike qualities. The combination of texts and drawings that was meant to create this impression was not supposed to submerge him in the uncertainties of the “purely fantastic” as described by Todorov. The influence of the scientific thinking about dreams in the beginning of the century, which is visible in the work, in particular that of the physiologists who have a “perceptionist” hypothesis concerning dreams (J. Carroy), attests to this. Contemporary science is pressed into serving a fantastical tale whose aim is critical : the reader is nudged into reconstituting the narrative, empirical and ideological narratives behind the hallucinations Gaspard de la Nuit represents, in order to find in reading the work the same type of pleasure as that found in contemplating a trompe-l’oeil.