People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

The joke rests on a mismatch between the speaker’s enthusiasm and the listener’s ordeal. Dreams feel urgent and meaningful to the dreamer, but to others they are typically shapeless narratives without shared stakes—an imposition at a moment (breakfast) associated with routine, privacy, and limited attention. By calling such people “terrors,” Beerbohm exaggerates a minor nuisance into a comic social menace, exposing how conversational egotism can masquerade as intimacy. The line also implies a code of good talk: offer what is mutually intelligible and pleasurable, not what merely flatters one’s own sense of significance.