Still with me? Hope so-- this is the turning point. The Dream. Quite possibly the best dream sequence committed to print, or at least the best committed to ridiculous Russian print. Nothing Ridiculous About It... excuse me while I contain my excitement.
One note of homonymic clarification: about halfway through the dream, as he's flying through space, our protagonist asks his ethereal companion: "Is that Sirius?" Not "Is that serious?" It's the star, a bright one, I hear, and not the manner. Or maybe it's both... that's for the theorists and linguists to decide.
Miette's Bedtime Story Ridicast: Fyodor Dostoevsky: Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Chapter 3)