Van Gogh captures something peculiar about genuine creation: it isn't the gap between vision and reality, but their collapse into each other. Most of us treat dreaming and doing as separate rooms—we imagine in one place, execute in another, and disappointment lives in the space between. But he's describing a feedback loop where the act of painting *becomes* the dream itself, where the brush stroke teaches the hand what the mind couldn't quite articulate. Watch a musician lose themselves in improvisation, or notice how a parent inventing a bedtime story shapes itself as it's told—the making *is* the imagining, not its poor cousin.