How does the description of the protagonist's "dreams realized" as "horrors and malformities" in *The Sleeper Awakes* immediately establish the novel's central conflict or message, and what does this suggest about Wells' view of progress?

From the book

For other versions of this work, see The Sleeper Awakes . ← The Sleeper Awakes ( 1921 ) by H. G. Wells → The Sleeper Awakes is a dystopian novel by H. G. Wells about a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed London, where, because of compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world. The main character awakes to see his dreams realized, and the future revealed to him in all its horrors and malformities. The novel was originally serialized in The Graphic from 1898 to 1903, titled When the Sleeper Wakes and…

not really struck him vividly at the time that he was the Sleeper. He had to recall precisely what they had said. . . . He walked into the bedroom and peered up through the quick intervals of the revolving fan. As the fan swept round, a dim turmoil like the noise of machinery came in rhythmic eddies. All else was silence. Though the perpetual day still irradiated his apartments, he perceived the little intermittent strip of sky was now deep blue — black almost, with a dust of little stars. . . . He resumed his examination of the rooms. He could find no way of opening the padded door, no bell…

d not understand, incidents that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral ideals, flashes of dubious enlightenment. The blue canvas that bulked so largely in his first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness. He started and rubbed his eyes. He had been so absorbed in the latter-day substitute for a novel, that ​ he awoke to the little green and white room with more than a…

ury Venusberg. He forgot the part played by the model in nineteenth century art, and gave way to an archaic indignation. He rose, angry and half ashamed at himself for witnessing this thing even in solitude. He pulled forward the apparatus, and with some violence sought for a means of stopping its action. Something snapped. A violet spark stung and convulsed his arm and the thing was still. When he attempted next day to replace these Tannhauser cylinders by another pair, he found the apparatus broken.... He struck out a path oblique to the room and paced to and fro, struggling with…

in clear small voices. It was exactly like reality viewed through an inverted opera glass and heard through a long tube. His interest was seized at once by the situation, which presented a man pacing up and down and vociferating angry things to a pretty but petulant woman. Both were in the picturesque costume that seemed so strange to Graham. "I have worked," said the man, "but what have you been doing?" "Ah!" said Graham. He forgot everything else, and sat down in the chair. Within five minutes he heard himself named, heard "when the Sleeper wakes," used jestingly as a proverb for remote…