quotations about dreams & dreaming
Dream different dreams while on the same bed.
CHINESE PROVERB
My bounce-around life had taught me that dreams were dangerous things -- they look solid in your mind, but you just try to reach for them. It's like gathering clouds.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Big Sky
Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook J", The Waste Books
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Hypnos"
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
The longer that dreams remained mere dreams, the more difficult it was to mold them into reality.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
ERMA BOMBECK
attributed, Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
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
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Winter of Our Discontent
It feels in dreams
That everything is there for you
The city breathes and pulses
It's for you electron blue
R.E.M.
"Sing for the Submarine"
If you're smart, then your dreams evolve, too.
MARIO BATALI
Esquire, Jun. 2004
All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
The Miracle of Right Thought
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Interpretation of Dreams
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
I dream, therefore I exist.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Madman's Defense
In dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Cities of the Plain
Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion