quotations about dreams & dreaming
Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
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
In dreams no man wears a mask.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
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
No man lives long when his dreams are dead.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.
EUGÈNE IONESCO
Man With Bags
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"
I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
The dream deceives; it leads to confusions; it is illusory. But it is not erroneous.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters: 1892-1910
Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation and Earth
If you do not fear God, then fear your dreams, because they're how He talks to you.
TIM LEBBON
Face
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
Why did I keep hitching myself to dreams as big as that Montana sky? I was like Rooster Jim's chickens, with no way to fly that high.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Ever After
If you talk about it, it's a dream, if you envision it, it's possible, but if you schedule it, it's real.
ANTHONY ROBBINS
Get the Edge
In what we may term "prescientific days" people were in no uncertainty about the interpretation of dreams. When they were recalled after awakening they were regarded as either the friendly or hostile manifestation of some higher powers, demoniacal and Divine. With the rise of scientific thought the whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.
SIGMUND FREUD
"Dreams Have a Meaning", Dream Psychology
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
White Nights
The pillow is a silent sibyl--despise not its oracles.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Hear in a realm of wordless dreams--
That inner life which knows and thinks;
My thirsty spirit comes and drinks
The petal dew of golden streams;
Where death is less than what it seems,
And life is subtler than the Sphinx.
HENRY ABBEY
"May Dreams"