It was Tertullian who coined the phrase, anima naturaliter christiana. This means that in the innermost depth of every human being there is alive a sort of natural religion with its standards of true and false, good and evil; it means that man is pre-programmed to a sense of wonder and awe before the mystery of his existence and meaning within the universe.

Plays, like The Glass Menagerie and A Streztcar Named Desire in this essay, often imply this basic truth of man's openness to the transcendent when a man's dreams are seen to surpass both his personal resources and those of his society for their attainment, yet dream he must. In fact, his dreams may become more real for him than any other reality of his historical condition, bearing witness to that reality which underlies human awareness and, nevertheless, transcends human definition.

Sometimes the dream is associated with madness when a man, tragically deluded about the meaning of his life, destroys himself in his attempt to force reality to conform to the shape of his illusions. There is a profound pathos in a man's faithful response to a destructive illusion, to the wrong dream : even this, however, is perhaps better than no dream at all. In any case the theatre in general and Tennessee Williams's Glass MenaEerie and Streetcar in particular reveal much about man and the quality of his dreams; they reveal how much man and his society can be transformed for better or for worse by them.