quotations about dreams & dreaming
What I want to do is travel deep and deeper into the dreamlands, to find that place that I know is waiting for me here. My home.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Interpretation of Dreams
No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
Why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
"The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?", Nautilus, April 20, 2017
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
The dream-state, from the standpoint of the waking, consists only of thinking and feeling. But the dreamer has no idea that he is dreaming, for according to his experience, tangible objects are also perceived. Thus the dream-state is definable in exactly the same terms as the waking.
JOHN LEVY
The Nature of Man According to the Vedanta
Dreams only change their houses.
They cannot be lined up against a wall
And quietly buried under ground,
And no more heard of ...
However deep the pit and heaped the clay--
Like seedlings of old time
Hooding a sacred rose under the ice cap of the world--
Dreams will to light.
LOLA RIDGE
"Dreams"
The pillow is a silent sibyl--despise not its oracles.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world--just no more confusing than any other.
ALEX GARLAND
The Coma
When we can't dream any longer we die.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Mother Earth Bulletin
The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.
GEORGE ELIOT
Theophrastus Such
Dreams that are realized become an inspiration for new endeavor. It is in the power to make the dream good that we find the hope of this world.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
He Can Who Thinks He Can
Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, and with false flitting shapes our minds delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain.
JONATHAN SWIFT
On Dreams
Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Eleonora"
Well now what's the use in dreamin'
You got better things to do
Dreams never did work for me anyway
Even when they did come true
BOB DYLAN
"I Feel a Change Comin' On"
When the desire is too much to bear, we often bury it beneath frenzied thoughts and activities or escape it by dulling our immediate consciousness of living. It is possible to run away from the desire for years, even decades, at a time, but we cannot eradicate it entirely. It keeps touching us in little glimpses and hints in our dreams, our hopes, our unguarded moments.
GERALD G. MAY
The Awakened Heart