My dreams are all follies.

Taken at face value, the line reads as a moment of self-rebuke: the speaker looks back on private aspirations (“dreams”) and judges them as foolish—either naïve, unrealistic, or morally misguided. In Caldwell’s fiction, such a sentiment often functions as a pivot from romantic or idealistic expectation toward harsher self-knowledge, where desire collides with social constraint, guilt, or disillusionment. The bluntness of “all” intensifies the verdict, suggesting not a single mistaken plan but a wholesale collapse of hope. Without a verified textual setting, the safest reading is as an expression of disenchantment and the painful clarity that can follow ambition, love, or faith when they fail to match reality.