The introductory paragraphs of “Rappaccini's Daughter” pose an issue about understanding Hawthorne's fiction which readers are expected to resolve. Hawthorne states that he attempts only slight portrayal of “outward manners” and seeks instead to create interest by “some less obvious peculiarity” of his subject. Readers must take his stories in “precisely the proper point of view,” because from other vantage points the stories “can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.” Despite Hawthorne's warning that this unnamed point of view is of primary importance in reading his fiction, critics have paid little attention to the issue. Chapter headings and indexes of major critical studies of Hawthorne make no reference to point of view, and bibliographies list almost no essays on it in the journals. In this study, a brief and tentative essay in definition, I shall maintain that the point of view essential for reading Hawthorne is one of dream. Hawthorne ordinarily invokes it as a metaphor; readers see the action as what he terms a “conscious dream” (AN, p. 125). He often establishes his metaphor through use of the semblance of actual dream early in a story and heightens its effect by employing the apparition of real dream in later moments or scenes. Only rarely, however, does Hawthorne go beyond the bounds of his characteristic metaphor and cause readers to view all the events of his story as incidents in an actual dream. Hawthorne's fictional definition of the dream point of view is exact and full, his use of it imaginative and subtle. In his own phrase, from the preface to The Snow-Image, the dream mode leads readers to the center of his fiction by revelation of the “burrowing into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance.” Hawthorne is the artist as conscious dreamer, often of dreams that turn into nightmares and bare the tragic realities of human existence.