IN “The Night Face Up”—a 1956 short story by Julio Cortázar, an Argentine master of magical realism—a young man lies in a hospital at night, one injured arm held aloft by weights and pulleys. He is tormented by a recurring nightmare in which he is being hunted by Aztec warriors. The dreams are vivid, from the cling and reek of the jungle swamp in which he is captured to the chill of a dungeon floor and the hands dragging him up stone steps to an altar slick with human blood. The gore is mostly hinted at. The story's menace turns on the man's repeated struggles to wake and return to his darkened ward.

Across the rich world and above all in western Europe, lots of voters know just how that young patient feels. They yearn to hear that today's unhappy realities—of austerity and spending cuts, debt, intermittent growth and relative decline—are a nightmare from which they can wake. They long to return to the “normality” of the boom years ended by the credit crunch of 2007. As incumbents wobble or fall across the continent, opposition politicians fall over themselves to agree with voters that today's miseries are a bad dream which their policies would end. Dismaying numbers have turned to extremists, peddling fantasies that would do this trick: vows to “reject austerity” and confiscate elite wealth; plans to slam the door on foreigners or enact rules to keep global competition at bay.

To their credit, the British, a sceptical, stolid bunch, are pretty wary of extremists and obvious charlatans. True, recent local elections were tough on the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties that make up the coalition government at Westminster. But this was mostly to the benefit of the mainstream opposition Labour Party, rather than to extremists on the far-right or far-left. Perhaps the loudest message was sent by the two-thirds of people who did not vote for anybody.

Britain “is not Greece or France,” says Rick Nye of the polling firm Populus. Though the coalition's talk of austerity is not popular, a “significant enough minority” are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt that Mr Cameron has something his continental peers lack: time to try to fix the economy.

But if Britain's politicians have largely avoided the politics of outright fantasy, too many hint that—with the right policies—the British, too, could wake up and find that the country's problems have vanished, like bogeymen vanquished by the rising sun.

Start with Labour. Ed Balls, Labour's shadow chancellor of the exchequer, blames Britain's economic woes on the government's plan to eliminate the structural deficit within five years (a plan that nonetheless saw Britain run a deficit above 8% last year, a hefty support to the economy). Mr Balls talks up micro-wheezes that would supposedly change everything: plans to tax bank bonuses to create 100,000 jobs for young people, tax breaks for small firms that hire workers and a temporary cut in VAT. In one sense, Mr Balls's Keynesian conscience is clear, because he is merely making a technical argument about the optimal pace of deficit reduction and the impact of stimulus spending. Labour “can't reverse every Tory cut,” concedes his boss, Mr Miliband. Yet for all that supposed realism, lots of voters are meant to hear a simpler promise—that they can wake from the nightmare of austerity, because Labour has “pro-growth” plans that pay for themselves. As Mr Balls puts it, Britain's recent return to recession was “entirely avoidable”.

Labour is not the only party playing “if only” politics. North of the border, the core message of the Scottish National Party (SNP) is that independence from Britain would spell a new dawn, dispelling the bad dream of English misrule. On the right, for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the nightmare from which to wake is European Union membership.

Such battle-cries can attract voters: the SNP took control of the Scottish government in 2011. UKIP (which won 13 seats at the 2009 European elections, beating Labour into third place) hovers around 10% in current national polling, and took enough disgruntled Tory votes in this month's local elections to deny the Conservatives council seats in some southern strongholds. Not all of its supporters believe in magic and bad dreams. Professional polling and focus groups of UKIP voters after the 2010 general election found Europe to be their third-biggest concern, behind the economy and—by a long way—immigration. In one two-hour focus group, nobody raised Europe—the party's ostensible reason for existence. Yet if UKIP's vote continues to rise, its angry promises of quitting the EU will have real world consequences. Should UKIP come first in the 2014 European election, senior Labour and Conservative sources predict their parties will feel under intense pressure to promise a referendum on Britain's EU membership in their next general election manifestos. As for the Conservatives, their pledge to cut net migration to the tens of thousands is unrealisable, and implicitly endorses the idea that immigrants are, on balance, a job-stealing nightmare.

The twist in the tale: the bad stuff is real

Cortázar's story ends with a twist: the man realises that he is, in reality, an Aztec prisoner. Modern life, the hospital, his motorcycle like “an enormous metal insect, whirring away between his legs”, was the absurd dream, falling away as he awaits death.

Britons and other Europeans need to go through a similarly vertiginous moment. For decades workers, faced with exploding global competition, were compensated by governments with cheap goods, early retirement and welfare on credit: a dream of affluence for life to replace jobs for life. Now the competition is as intense as ever, societies are ageing and their nations are poorer than they thought only a few years ago. The boom years were the dream. Hard work and tighter belts are the new reality.

^{Economist.com/blogs/bagehot}