It would reach the point where the most trifling things would anger Lizaveta Prokofyevna terribly and put her beside herself. Alexandra Ivanova liked, for instance, to sleep long hours and usually had many dreams; but her dreams were always distinguished by a sort of extraordinary emptiness and innocence—suitable for a seven-year-old child; and so even the innocence of her dreams began for some reason to annoy her mother. Once Alexandra Ivanova saw nine hens in a dream, and this caused a formal quarrel between her and her mother—why?—it is difficult to explain.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot