Another passage from The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch –
Last night Monty had had a dream which struck him as interesting. He had been a pupil at some sort of grand school, somewhere near the sea, huge and built out of marble. The school was set upon pink rocks, pitted with azure pools, and across those rocks Monty had to scramble in order to reach some class or seminar which it was very important that he should attend. The rocks were slippery, but at last he reached a flight of marble steps which came down among them, and mounted the steps into a large hall surrounded by pillars and partly open to the sky. A man in white robes was standing in the hall obviously waiting for him, and Monty realized that before he could go on to the classroom he had to pass some sort of preliminary test. The white-robed figure said to him, 'You must simply mime what I tell you now. Pretend that you are scooping up water in your hands.' Monty leaned down to the ground and began to scoop up imaginary water in his hands. As he did so he glimpsed his mentor's face. It wore a sad disappointed expression and Monty knew that he had failed the test. Then he realized that a saintly man would have imagined himself to be immersed in water up the chest, up to the neck.
I'm fascinated to realize that this dream was written decades before the first Harry Potter film was ever made and to notice how prophetically it describes the grandiose quasi-mystical tone and appearance of a Harry Potter film scene on a Harry Potter film set.