quotations about dreams & dreaming
Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation and Earth
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
The pillow is a silent sibyl--despise not its oracles.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.
EUGÈNE IONESCO
Man With Bags
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters: 1892-1910
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
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
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
Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe.... The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss ... and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange anomalities, weird vegetation, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.
VICTOR HUGO
Travailleurs de la Mer
If you do not fear God, then fear your dreams, because they're how He talks to you.
TIM LEBBON
Face
We could be dreaming all the time, but we do not perceive those dreams while we are awake because consciousness (like the sun obscuring stars during the day) is much too brilliant to allow the unconscious content so much definition.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
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
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
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"
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
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
We all have our dreams. May we find them, and God have mercy on us when we do.
TANITH LEE
The Book of the Dead
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
The dream deceives; it leads to confusions; it is illusory. But it is not erroneous.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
When we can't dream any longer we die.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Mother Earth Bulletin