In Scève's world of love the use of the dream topos permits the elaboration of a fictive space where desire is played out. Within that locus the quest for Délie as supreme object of knowledge engenders a being whose reality cannot be separated from the very conditions under which that knowledge is produced. Délie becomes the point of reference of poetic invention, the desired object who overwhelms soul and sense and generates the possibilities of love within the framework of the dream. “Ma liberté lui a toute asseruie” (D. 6). The text depicts the poet's journey into an unknown world by representing the desiring mind's engagement in an aesthetically sublimated form of intersubjectivity that is essentially self-consuming. Against the figural backdrop of the mind's private “eye,” the subject enters into a relationship with the other, not as a real being, but rather as a mental object reflecting the anxieties of love. The dream narrative thus enacts a discursive fable that catalyzes the poet's energy towards the unthinkable, a domain to which he is drawn but from which he must ironically flee. Accordingly, this paradoxical situation is represented in the text by the specular relationship established between the desiring subject and the projection of an elusive feminine presence that gives substance to that desire and yet intermittently blocks its emergence. “Ie le vouluz, & ne l'osay vouloir” (D. 76).