Dreaming is a bust version of An American Girl, featuring the same helmet-like headscarf and facial features. Along with Galina X, An American Girl and Dreaming are the only sculptures from this group of works which have a discernible human face. In a critique of the state of contemporary art at the time – which he deemed as having become too self-involved and simplified through extensive abstraction, and thus lacking relation to human experience – Alistair Dunlop praised Laing’s work for its humanism:

“It is almost as if his sculptural development can be seen as an art historical journey in reverse. This does not, however, mean that the current work belongs to the 16th, 17th or 19th centuries; it is inevitably rooted in the late 20th century experience of the sculptor himself. Often it is possible to make visual comparisons with the sculpture of the past: the cowled figures of An American Girl and Ecce Domino seem reminiscent of Claus Sluter’s Lacrimae figures for the tomb of Philip the Good at Dijon but in fact the artist was quite unaware of them at the time. One can also see echoes of Rodin and Michaelangelo, Benini and Gian Bologna but these come about because Laing is interested in these artists, in their own times, who were trying to solve similar philosophical and artistic problems. What interests Laing in these artists and also those of classical Greece and Rome is not so much the forms of the sculpture itself but the way it interprets the society through the philosophies of classicism, humanism and idealism.” (Alistair Dunlop, unpublished manuscript, 1980.)