The poet sets the scene by invoking the sense that everyone but the speaker, the reader, and Dorothea are awake to witness the action: "the stupefied world collapses into a siesta, a sort of delicious death where the sleeper, half awake, savors the sensuality of annihilation." While Women of Algiers in Their Apartment appears to be very real - the viewer feels like they are witnessing a historical reality traditionally prohibited from view - the women seem lost in a dreamlike reverie or reflection. The tobacco pipe in the center of the room is the only suggestion of any activity that these women may be participating in; its presence suggests a drugged, slightly hallucinatory vision or dreamscape. The lack of an evocation of sound in each of these works is interesting because it further advances their dreamlike quality - these scenes are apart from the real world and all of its hustle and bustle. Ultimately, Baudelaire and Delacroix both invoke and transcend reality in these two works.
One way in which these two artists transcend reality is by playing with the contrasting elements of interior and exterior. "Beautiful Dorothea" begins with an exterior cityscape where "the sun overwhelms the city with its direct and terrible light; the sand is dazzling and the sea shimmers." But Baudelaire moves slowly into the interior of Dorothea in terms of her body and her interior space - first he hints at the shape of her body underneath her dress and lifts her skirt to reveal "a shining, splendid leg," then he penetrates her "little cottage so coquettishly arranged," and finally the speaker pierces her physical exterior and enters her mind, letting the reader enter her thoughts and frustrations: "she"d be perfectly happy if she were not obliged to save, piaster by piaster, to buy her little sister." Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, in contrast, defines itself as an interior by its very title and is further characterized as an interior in Delacroix's handling of the subjects.