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Dreams

series of images, thoughts, and emotions, often with a story-like quality, generated by mental activity during sleep; the state in which this occurs
For the desire to achieve something, see Aspiration.
For goals, aims, and purpose in life, see Purpose.
For the passive desire for a future outcome, see Hope.

A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history. Dream interpretation is the attempt at drawing meaning from dreams and searching for an underlying message. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.


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A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · Dreams: What They Are and How They Are Caused, by C.W. Leadbeater, (1898) · See also · External links

Never the spirit was born, the spirit shall cease to be never. Never was time it was not, end and beginning are dreams.
~ Bhagavad Gita
Life, what is it but a dream?
~ Lewis Carroll

We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected—like it or not—"life is but a dream".
~ Buckminster Fuller
The dreamer dies, but never dies the dream…
Say never more
That dreams are fragile things. What else endures
Of all this broken world save only dreams!
~ Dana Burnet
Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.
~ The Bible, Book of Joel, 2,28
I can but entreat you to remember it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
~ James Branch Cabell
A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
~ René Char
The center of every man's existence is a dream.
~ G. K. Chesterton
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye, what then?
~ Coleridge
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?
~ Leonardo da Vinci
All our dreams can come true — if we have the courage to pursue them.
~ Walt Disney
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...
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
The actual forms and images of my dream, that is, the very ones I really saw at the very time of my dream, were filled with such harmony, were so lovely and enchanting and were so actual, that on awakening I was, of course, incapable of clothing them in our poor language... ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
All this is a dream. —Michael Faraday
To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.~ Anatole France
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. ~ Erich Fromm
Always believe in your dreams, because if you don't, you'll still have hope. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
When a dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,
When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much. ~ Robert Graves
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. ~ Thomas Jefferson
The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach. ~ Carl Jung
I chose to dream and act on my dreams, following the example that my father taught. To live with this dream may be crazy, it may be foolish, but to live without it would be a nightmare. ~ Yolanda King
Yes, you can kill the dreamer. Absolutely, you can kill the dreamer. But you cannot kill the dream. ~ Samuel Kyles
Is this is a dream? O, if it be a dream,
Let me sleep on, and do not wake me yet! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The king lay down not to sleep, he lay down to dream. ~ Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave
The value of dreams, like … divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives.~ Rollo May
But the persistence of REM begs the question: Why is it so insistent? When rats are robbed of REM for four weeks they die (although the cause of death remains unknown). Amazingly, even though we spend about 27 years dreaming over the course of an average life, scientists still can't agree on why it's important.
Psychiatrist Jerry Siegel, head of the Center for Sleep Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently proved that REM is nonexistent in some big-brained mammals, such as dolphins and whales. "Dying from lack of REM is totally bogus," Siegel says. "It's never been shown in any species other than a rat."
Some theories suggest that REM helps regulate body temperature and neurotransmitter levels. And there is also evidence that dreaming helps us assimilate memories. Fetuses and babies spend 75 percent of their sleeping time in REM. Then again, platypuses experience more REM than any other animal and researchers wonder why, because, as Minnesota's Mahowald puts it, "Platypuses are stupid. What do they have to consolidate?"
But, given that rats run through dream mazes that precisely match their lab mazes, others feel that there must be some purpose or meaningful information in dreams. ~ Christie Nicholson
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.~ Edgar Allan Poe
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.~ Edgar Allan Poe
I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.~ Shakespeare
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. ~ Thoreau
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. ~ Christopher Reeve
The greatest man of action is he who is the greatest, and a life-long, dreamer. [...] A democracy should not let its dreamers perish. They are its life, its guaranty against decay. ~ Louis Sullivan
Dream is akin to aspiration. And aspiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision. ~ Leo Strauss
We grow great by dreams. ~ Woodrow Wilson
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ~ William Butler Yeats
During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. ~ Zhuangzi
After ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night. ~ Zhuangzi
Still enveloped in a blanket of dreams
my life continued to lie still, pretending as if
it was in a deep slumber.
~ Suman Pokhrel

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  • Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.
  • In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.
    • A translation of János Arany's words "Álomban és szerelemben nincs lehetetlenség", as quoted in Wood, James. Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources. p. 11. 

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  • Sweet sleep be with us, one and all!
    And if upon its stillness fall
    The visions of a busy brain,
    We'll have our pleasure o'er again,
    To warm the heart, to charm the sight,
    Gay dreams to all! good night, good night.
  • Hypnotic dreams have long been a method by which hypnosis is utilized in psychotherapy; however, the research on their characteristics in comparison to nocturnal dreams is sparse. Physiological correlates of hypnotic dreams have been clearly established as resembling those of a relaxed waking state much more closely than they resemble any stage of sleep (Brady & Rosner, 1966; Tart, 1964), the one exception being the observation of rapid eye movements (REM) during some hypnotic dreams (Brady & Rosner, 1966; Schiff, Bunney, & Freedman, 1961).
    The content of hypnotic dreams has been less methodically tested. Some psychotherapists describe using hypnotic dreams in the same manner they would nocturnal dreams and believe their content to be virtually identical (Fromm, 1965; Sacerdote, 1968; Schneck, 1953). Other authors describe having observed differences between two categories (Gill & Brenman, 1959; Tart, 1966). The most empirical articles to date have indicated some possible differences, such as hypnotic dreams being shorter, having fewer characters,having more "Alice-in-Wonderland" size distortions (Hilgard & Nowlis, 1972), and being less vivid, less fearful, and more plausible (Spanos & Ham, 1975). Tart (1966) found a correlation between depth of trance and vividness of hypnotic dreams. Some authors such as Barber (1962) and Walker (1974) assert that hypnotic dream content is identical to that of waking fantasy and quite different from nocturnal dreams. Obviously there are many contradictions in the literature of this area.
  • Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it.
  • And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.
    • The Bible, Book of Joel, chapter 2, verse 28.
  • Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.
    • André Breton, initiator of French Surrealism, from the first Manifesto of Surrealism - 1924; The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, reprinted in Marguerite Bonnet, ed. (1988). Oeuvres complètes, 1:328. Paris: Éditions Gallimard
  • I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.
    • Emily Brontë, Catherine Earnshaw (Ch. IX). Wuthering Heights (1847).
  • The dreamer dies, but never dies the dream,
    Though Death shall call the whirlwind to his aid,
    Enlist men’s passions, trick their hearts with hate,
    Still shall the Vision live! Say never more
    That dreams are fragile things. What else endures
    Of all this broken world save only dreams!
    • Dana Burnet, "Who Dreams Shall Live", in Poems (1915), p. 209, lines 11–16.
  • Perhaps you have heard the story of Christopher Wren, one of the greatest of English architects, who walked one day unrecognized among the men who were at work upon the building of St. Paul's cathedral in London which he had designed. "What are you doing?" he inquired of one of the workmen, and the man replied, "I am cutting a piece of stone." As he went on he put the same question to another man, and the man replied, "I am earning five shillings twopence a day." And to a third man he addressed the same inquiry and the man answered, "I am helping Sir Christopher Wren build a beautiful cathedral." That man had vision. He could see beyond the cutting of the stone, beyond the earning of his daily wage, to the creation of a work of art—the building of a great cathedral. And in your life it is important for you to strive to attain a vision of the larger whole.
    • Attributed to Louise Bush-Brown, director of the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women. Reported in as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

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  • I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books—brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.
  • The Dream, as I now know, is not best served by making parodies of it, and it does not greatly matter after all whether a book be an epic or a directory. What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts. . . . But you, I think, have always comprehended this.
  • With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man's bodily organs, left the man's parish unaffected: only a man's thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words — since marble and canvas inevitably perished — was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth....
    • James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest (1917) "Richard Fentnor Harroby" in Ch. 24 : Deals with Pen Scratches.
  • Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.
    • James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion : A Comedy of Redemption (1926), Manuel, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Chapter XXV : Last Obligation upon Manuel
  • People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.
    • James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion : A Comedy of Redemption (1926), Niafer, in Book Ten : At Manuel's Tomb, Chapter LXIX : Economics of Jurgen.
  • When we're all a mess I guess the only way out is a sweet dream.
  • Alice! a childish story take,
    And with a gentle hand
    Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined
    In Memory's mystic band,
    Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers
    Plucked in a far-off land.
  • No es posible sino soñar, morir,/soñar que no morimos/y, a veces, un instante, despertar.
    • All we can do is dream, or die,/dream that we do not die/and, at times, for a moment, wake.
    • The selected poems of Rosario Castellanos (1989)
  • Again let us dream where the land lies sunny
    And live, like the bees, on our hearts' old honey,
    Away from the world that slaves for money—
    Come, journey the way with me.
    • Madison Cawein, " A Song of the Road", in New Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1909), p. 102
  • Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.
    • A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
      • René Char, as quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132.
  • The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
  • I have become increasingly convinced that some of the popular methods presumed to discover what is in the unconscious cannot be counted upon as reliable methods of obtaining evidence. They often involve the use of symbolism and analogy in such a way that the interpreter can find virtually anything that he is looking for. Freud, for instance, from a simple dream reported by a man in his middle twenties [i.e., Sergei Pankejeff ] as having occurred at 4 years of age drew remarkable conclusions. The 4-year-old boy dreamed of seeing six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree. Freud interpreted the dream in such a way as to convince himself that the patient at 18 months of age had been shocked by seeing his parents have intercourse three times in succession and that this played a major part in the extreme fear of being castrated by his father which Freud ascribed to him at 4 years of age. No objective evidence was ever offered to support this conclusion. Nor was actual fear of castration ever made to emerge into the light of consciousness despite years of analysis.
  • If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye, what then?
  • Don't ever let someone tell you, you can't do something. Not even me. You got a dream, you got to protect it. People can't do something themselves, they want to tell you you can't do it. You want something, go get it. Period.
  • Dream after dream ensues;
    And still they dream that they shall still succeed;
    And still are disappointed.

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  • I dream of vampires. I dream of god. I dream of no vampires. I dream of no god. I dream of nothing. And yet that too is still my dream.
  • Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy.
  • Men will seem to see new destructions in the sky. The flames that fall from it will seem to rise in it and to fly from it with terror. They will hear every kind of animals speak in human language. They will instantaneously run in person in various parts of the world, without motion. They will see the greatest splendour in the midst of darkness. O! marvel of the human race! What madness has led you thus! You will speak with animals of every species and they with you in human speech. You will see yourself fall from great heights without any harm and torrents will accompany you, and will mingle with their rapid course.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XX Humorous Writings, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.
  • Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness; and this truth is in itself so excellent that, even when it dwells on humble and lowly matters, it is still infinitely above uncertainty and lies, disguised in high and lofty discourses; because in our minds, even if lying should be their fifth element, this does not prevent that the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects, though not of wandering wits. But you who live in dreams are better pleased by the sophistical reasons and frauds of wits in great and uncertain things, than by those reasons which are certain and natural and not so far above us.
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy.
  • 'I say to my students: We all spend a big chunk of our lives dreaming—we obviously need to do it for some reason.'
    • Drew Dawson, Director, Centre for Sleep Research, UNISA In Williams, Daniel (April 5, 2007). "While you were sleeping". Time magazine. Archived from the original on October 3, 2011. Retrieved October 9, 2011.
  • Somehow, I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. The special secret it seems to me is summarized in four C's. They are Curiosity, Courage, Confidence and Constancy. And the greatest of all is Confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.
    • Walt Disney, as quoted in Perceive This! : How to Get Everything You Want Out of Life by Changing Your Perceptions (2004) by Kevin A. Martin, Ch. 9, No Bar Too High!, p. 64.
  • All our dreams can come true—if we have the courage to pursue them.
    • Walt Disney, How to Be Like Walt : Capturing the Magic Every Day of Your Life (2004), Ch. 3 : Imagination Unlimited, p. 63; Unsourced variant: All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.
  • During the late nineteenth century it was generally believed by dream theorists that dreams were very brief, usually in reaction to an internal or external stimulus, or even that they occurred during the process of awakening. Freud (1900) tried to blend these perspectives by comparing dreams to "a firework that has been hours in the preparation, and then blazes up in a moment." He agreed that they last for only a brief time, and perhaps occur only during awakening, but added the idea that the thoughts underlying dreams develop slowly during the day. However, contrary to Freud, laboratory studies reveal that dreaming takes place longer, more frequently, and more regularly than he or any other theorist ever imagined before the serendipitous discovery of sleep stages in 1953 (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953; Dement, 1955; Dement & Kleitman, 1957).
  • Freud also asserted that "a reference to the events of the day just past is to be discovered in every dream," but five detailed studies demonstrate that only about half of dreams contain even the slightest "day residue" that can be identified by the dreamer (Botman & Crovitz, 1989; Harlow & Roll, 1992; Hartmann, 1968; Marquardt, Bonato, & Hoffmann, 1996; Nielsen & Powell, 1992). As part of his emphasis on the large role of specific memories in shaping dream content, Freud believed that all significant speeches in dreams can be traced to memories of speeches heard or sentences read, but the analysis of hundreds of speech acts in dreams collected in sleep laboratories shows they are usually new constructions appropriate to the unfolding dream context, not reproductions (Meier, 1993). Indeed, speech acts are so appropriate to the dream context that bi-lingual participants in one sleep study reported that they spoke in the language understood by the dream character with whom they were talking(Foulkes, Meier, Strauch, & Kerr, 1993).
  • Freud's most famous and important claim was that "wish-fulfillment is the meaning of each and every dream." Although this hypothesis was based on his work with adult patients, he began his argument with several simple wishful dreams that he overheard from his pre-school children or learned of through the parents of the dreamers. However, a five-year longitudinal study in the sleep laboratory of 14 children ages 3-5 reveals on the basis of dozens of awakenings that young children have static and bland dreams, not at all like Freud's anecdotal examples (Foulkes, 1982; Foulkes, 1999).
  • Dreaming is like—it's like being a slave. Your dreams come out of all the parts of you that you don't have any control over.
  • 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!
  • Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream — oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!
  • In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded, and it benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement.
  • Oh, everyone laughs in my face now, and assures me that one cannot dream of such details as I am telling now, that I only dreamed or felt one sensation that arose in my heart in delirium and made up the details myself when I woke up. And when I told them that perhaps it really was so, my God, how they shouted with laughter in my face, and what mirth I caused! Oh, yes, of course I was overcome by the mere sensation of my dream, and that was all that was preserved in my cruelly wounded heart; but the actual forms and images of my dream, that is, the very ones I really saw at the very time of my dream, were filled with such harmony, were so lovely and enchanting and were so actual, that on awakening I was, of course, incapable of clothing them in our poor language, so that they were bound to become blurred in my mind; and so perhaps I really was forced afterwards to make up the details, and so of course to distort them in my passionate desire to convey some at least of them as quickly as I could. But on the other hand, how can I help believing that it was all true? It was perhaps a thousand times brighter, happier and more joyful than I describe it. Granted that I dreamed it, yet it must have been real. You know, I will tell you a secret: perhaps it was not a dream at all!
  • How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.
  • A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.
  • A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

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  • You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them.
  • They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
    Out of a misty dream
    Our path emerges for a while, then closes
    Within a dream.
    • Ernest Dowson, "They are not long, the weeping and the laughter," stanza 2, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson (1919), p. 22.
  • Nenne dich nicht arm, weil deine Träume nicht in Erfüllung gegangen sind; wirklich arm ist nur der, der nicht geträumt hat.
    • Don't call yourself poor, because your dreams are unfulfilled. Truly poor is only the one who has never dreamed.
    • Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Fünfhundert Aphorismen, p. 69

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  • All this is a dream. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these experiment is the best test of such consistency.
    • Michael Faraday, in his laboratory journal entry #10,040 (19 March 1849); published in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) Vol. II, edited by Henry Bence Jones, p. 253. This has sometimes been quoted partially as "Nothing is too wonderful to be true".
  • The seventeenth-century Iroquois, as described by the Jesuit missionaries, practiced a dream psychotherapy that was remarkably similar to Freud's discoveries two hundred years later. The Iroquois recognized the existence of an unconscious, the force of unconscious desires, the way in which the conscious mind attempts to repress unpleasant thoughts, the emergence of unpleasant thoughts in dreams, and the mental and physical (psychosomatic) illnesses that may be caused by the frustration of unconscious desires. The Iroquois knew that their dreams did not deal in facts but rather in symbols. ...And one of the techniques employed by the Iroquois seers to uncover the latent meanings behind a dream was free association... The Iroquois faith in dreams... is only somewhat diminished after more than three hundred years. ...The conclusions are inevitable: Had Freud not discovered psychotherapy, then someone else would have.
  • You have to believe we are magic, nothin' can stand in our way
    You have to believe we are magic, don't let your aim ever stray
    And if all your hopes survive, destiny will arrive
    I'll bring all your dreams alive, for you.
  • People say that your dreams are the only things that save ya... Come on baby in our dreams, we can live our misbehaviors
  • Pour accomplir de grandes choses il ne suffit pas d'agir il faut rêver; il ne suffit pas de calculer, il faut croire.
    • To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
    • Variant: To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.
    • Anatole France, Discours de réception, Séance De L'académie Française (introductory speech at a session of the French Academy), 24th December 1896, on Ferdinand de Lesseps' work on the Suez Canal.
  • If dreaming was selected for because of its adaptive function, the general content of dreams should certainly reflect this, and consist of situations that allow the rehearsal of scenarios that ultimately lead toward increased fitness. This is exactly what is seen, with studies indicating that dream content is biased toward negative elements reflecting threat, as opposed to positive elements. Data collected from over 500 dream reports by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) indicate that about 80% contained negative emotions, while only about 20% contained positive emotions. These negative dreams are also disproportionably likely to contain threatening elements such as animals and male strangers in threatening encounters. The evidence points towards the overrepresentation of threatening events in dreams, which should not occur if dream content is random. Through appropriating and learning to deal with these threats in dreams, it is proposed here that an animal could increase its overall evolutionary fitness.
  • Another example of a skill that has arguably played a pivotal role in other functional aspects of the human intellect and could serve to be shaped by dreaming is that of interpretation. As discussed by Bogdan (1997, p.108), “…key advances in interpretation, such as the recognition of belief, were accelerated by increased opportunities to interact with or manipulate subjects and slowed down by a lack of such opportunities.” As such, via teasing, play, mental rehearsal/imagery, or dreaming, the individual is given the opportunity to utilize successful strategies in dealing with these situations and further develop interpretive skills. In fact, studies of children’s dream-reports indicate that their dreams more often contain family members and close friends than adults’ dreams (Hobson, 1988), possibly due to the fact that it is more important for younger children to be practicing close interpersonal skills than it is for adults.
  • The latent content of dreams consists of:
    1. Dynamically unconscious wishes (id impulses) prevented by the censorship (the defences of the ego) from reaching consciousness or even the system preconscious during waking life. Several wishes may be present in the same dream:
    'Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include several wishfulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish-fulfilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest childhood. And here again the question arises whether it might not be more correct to assert that this occurs "invariably" rather than "frequently".
  • The majority of these impulses are sexual in nature, and most of them stem from the infantile period of life: 'a dream might be described as a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being trnsferred on to a recent experience. The infantile scene is unable to bring about its own revival and has to be content with returning as a dream.'
  • The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
    • The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey.
    • At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in psychic life.
      • Alternate translation by Abraham Arden Brill, p. 483. Freud did use the Latin phrase via regia in the original as opposed to translating it into the German of the surrounding text.
    • Sigmund Freud "Royal road" or via regia is an allusion to a statement attributed to Euclid.
  • Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
  • Science's self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would require the scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical—because synergetically weightless. Metaphysical has been science's designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected—like it or not—"life is but a dream".

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  • Did I dream this belief
    Or did I believe this dream?
    Now I will find relief
    I grieve
  • Always believe in your dreams, because if you don't, you'll still have hope.
  • Pregnancy can do a number on your dreaming life. Patricia Garfield, PhD, author of Creative Dreaming, explained to WebMD, “There is a greater amount of actual dreaming and dream recall when a woman is pregnant than at any other time during her life.” She adds that dreams can say a lot about the pregnancy itself, saying, “The dreams will relate to her condition of pregnancy, the trimester she is in, and what is going on in her body at the time.”
  • When we can't dream any longer we die.
    • Emma Goldman Quoted by Margaret C. Anderson in "Emma Goldman in Chicago", Mother Earth magazine (December 1914)
  • When a dream is born in you
    With a sudden clamorous pain,
    When you know the dream is true
    And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,
    O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
    You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
  • The pain was maddening. You should pray to God when you're dying, if you can pray when you're in agony. In my dream I didn't pray to God, I thought of Roger and how dearly I loved him. The pain of those wicked flames was not half so bad as the pain I felt when I knew he was dead. I felt suddenly glad to be dying. I didn't know when you were burnt to death you'd bleed. I thought the blood would all dry up in the terrible heat. But I was bleeding heavily. The blood was dripping and hissing in the flames. I wished I had enough blood to put the flames out. The worst part was my eyes. I hate the thought of gong blind. It's bad enough when I'm awake but in dreams you can't shake the thoughts away. They remain. In this dream I was going blind. I tried to close my eyelids but I couldn't. They must have been burnt off, and now those flames were going to pluck my eyes out with their evil fingers, I didn't want to go blind. The flames weren't so cruel after all. They began to feel cold. Icy cold. It occurred to me that I wasn't burning to death but freezing to death.

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  • Many similarities are noted between the process of dreaming and the process of psychotherapy as usually practiced in the many dynamic psychotherapies deriving from Freud's work. Dreaming and psychotherapy both involve freeing of associations, prevention of acting out, and making psychological connections in many different senses, all occurring in a safe environment. In REM sleep, safety is provided by the bed and by muscular paralysis; in therapy, by the relationship with the therapist (alliance), the setting, and the rules of conduct. The similarity can be seen particularly clearly in the period following an acute trauma. Dreaming and therapy each give the patient a safe place in which to make connections between the trauma and other relevant memories, themes, and issues so that the trauma and its associated disturbing affect are eventually integrated into the patient's life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
  • The questions, "Why do we dream?" or "What is the function of dreaming?" are easy to ask but very difficult to answer. The most honest answer is that we do not yet know the function or functions of dreaming. This ignorance should not be surprising because despite many theories we still do not fully understand the purpose of sleep, nor do we know the functions of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is when most dreaming occurs. And these two biological states are much easier to study scientifically than the somewhat elusive phenomenon of dreaming.
  • I will try to explain a current view of dreaming and its possible functions, developed by myself and many collaborators, which we call the Contemporary Theory of Dreaming. The basic idea is as follows: activation patterns are shifting and connections are being made and unmade constantly in our brains, forming the physical basis for our minds. There is a whole continuum in the making of connections that we subsequently experience as mental functioning. At one end of the continuum is focused waking activity, such as when we are doing an arithmetic problem or chasing down a fly ball in the outfield. Here our mental functioning is focused, linear and well-bounded. When we move from focused waking to looser waking thought--reverie, daydreaming and finally dreaming--mental activity becomes less focused, looser, more global and more imagistic. Dreaming is the far end of this continuum: the state in which we make connections most loosely.
    Some consider this loose making of connections to be a random process, in which case dreams would be basically meaningless. The Contemporary Theory of Dreaming holds that the process is not random, however, and that it is instead guided by the emotions of the dreamer. When one clear-cut emotion is present, dreams are often very simple. Thus people who experience trauma--such as an escape from a burning building, an attack or a rape--often have a dream something like, "I was on the beach and was swept away by a tidal wave." This case is paradigmatic. It is obvious that the dreamer is not dreaming about the actual traumatic event, but is instead picturing the emotion, "I am terrified. I am overwhelmed." When the emotional state is less clear, or when there are several emotions or concerns at once, the dream becomes more complicated. We have statistics showing that such intense dreams are indeed more frequent and more intense after trauma. In fact, the intensity of the central dream imagery, which can be rated reliably, appears to be a measure of the emotional arousal of the dreamer.
  • [O]verall the contemporary theory considers dreaming to be a broad making of connections guided by emotion. But is this simply something that occurs in the brain or does it have a purpose as well? Function is always very hard to prove, but the contemporary theory suggests a function based on studies of a great many people after traumatic or stressful new events. Someone who has just escaped from a fire may dream about the actual fire a few times, then may dream about being swept away by a tidal wave. Then over the next weeks the dreams gradually connect the fire and tidal wave image with other traumatic or difficult experiences the person may have had in the past. The dreams then gradually return to their more ordinary state. The dream appears to be somehow "connecting up" or "weaving in" the new material in the mind, which suggests a possible function. In the immediate sense, making these connections and tying things down diminishes the emotional disturbance or arousal. In the longer term, the traumatic material is connected with other parts of the memory systems so that it is no longer so unique or extreme--the idea being that the next time something similar or vaguely similar occurs, the connections will already be present and the event will not be quite so traumatic. This sort of function may have been more important to our ancestors, who probably experienced trauma more frequently and constantly than we (at least those of us living in the industrialized world) do at present.
    Thus we consider a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events.
  • Dream and deed are not as different as many think. All the deeds of men are dreams at first, and become dreams in the end.
    • Theodor Herzl as quoted in The Israelis : Founders and Sons (1971) by Amos Elon, p. 57
  • The imaginations of them that sleep, are those we call Dreams. And these also (as all other Imaginations) have been before, either totally, or by parcells in the Sense. And because in sense, the Brain, and Nerves, which are the necessary Organs of sense, are so benummed in sleep, as not easily to be moved by the action of Externall Objects, there can happen in sleep, no Imagination; and therefore no Dreame, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of mans body; which inward parts, for the connexion they have with the Brayn, and other Organs, when they be distempered, do keep the same in motion; whereby the Imaginations there formerly made, appeare as if a man were waking; saving that the Organs of Sense being now benummed, so as there is no new object, which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression, a Dreame must needs be more cleare, in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts. And hence it cometh to passe, that it is a hard matter, and by many thought impossible to distinguish exactly between Sense and Dreaming. For my part, when I consider, that in Dreames, I do not often, nor constantly think of the same Persons, Places, Objects, and Actions that I do waking; nor remember so long a trayne of coherent thoughts, Dreaming, as at other times; And because waking I often observe the absurdity of Dreames, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking Thoughts; I am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dreame not; though when I dreame, I think my selfe awake.
  • I differ from Freud in that I think that most dreams are neither obscure nor bowdlerized, but rather that they are transparent and unedited. They reveal clearly meaningful undisguised and often highly conflictual themes worthy of note by the dreamer (and any interpretive assistant). My position echoes Jung's notion of dreams as transparently meaningful and does away with any distinction between manifest and latent content.
    • J. Allan Hobson, in The Dreaming Brain : How the brain creates both the sense and nonsense of dreams (1988)
  • Dreaming has fascinated and mystified humankind for ages: the bizarre and evanescent qualities of dreams have invited boundless speculation about their origin, meaning and purpose. For most of the twentieth century, scientific dream theories were mainly psychological. Since the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the neural underpinnings of dreaming have become increasingly well understood, and it is now possible to complement the details of these brain mechanisms with a theory of consciousness that is derived from the study of dreaming. The theory advanced here emphasizes data that suggest that REM sleep may constitute a protoconscious state, providing a virtual reality model of the world that is of functional use to the development and maintenance of waking consciousness.
  • What about dreams? What about them? They blur and leap; they hide, and they reveal. They feel like poems. Except without words. There's flight, there's music, but few words. My people in dreams rarely converse. Can I fly to poetry via dream? Find the words for the dream and have my poem? A dream will segue so naturally into morning sometimes, I move through the day sorting what's dream, what's real.
  • It is important to state here -- though evidence will be considered in detail later on -- that all three women have either had "dreams" or normal recollections of having been shown, at later times, tiny offspring whose appearance suggests they are something other than completely human . . . that they are in fact hybrids, partly human and partly what we must call, for want of a better term, alien. it is unthinkable and unbelievable -- yet the evidence points in that direction. An ongoing and systematic breeding experiment must be considered one of the central purposes of UFO abductions.
    • Budd Hopkins, in Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods , p. 130
  • Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.
    • Langston Hughes, in "Dreams" in the anthology Golden Slippers : An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941), edited by Arna Bontemps.

  • What happens to a dream deferred?

    Does it dry up
    like a raisin in the sun?
    Or fester like a sore —
    And then run?
    Does it stink like rotten meat?
    Or crust and sugar over —
    like a syrupy sweet?

    Maybe it just sags
    like a heavy load.

    Or does it explode?

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  • I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!
  • The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.
    • Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934).
  • We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
  • The main task of dreams is to bring back a sort of “recollection” of the prehistoric, as well as the infantile world, right down to the level of the most primitive instincts. Such recollections can have a remarkably healing effect in certain cases, as Freud saw long ago. This observation confirms the view that an infantile memory gap (a so-called amnesia) represents a positive loss and its recovery can bring a positive increase in life and wellbeing.

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  • All of this would have to be done within individual subjects. So you would never be able build a general classifier that could read anybody's dreams. They will all be idiosyncratic to the individual, so the brain activity will never be general across subjects.
  • Dreams.-This is a subject of much interest to those suffering from nocturnal pollutions, for these occurrences are almost always connected with dreams of a lascivious nature.
    In perfectly natural sleep, there are no dreams ; consciousness is entirely suspended. In the ordinary stage of dreaming, there is a peculiar sort of consciousness, many of the faculties of the mind being more or less active while the power of volition is wholly dormant. Carpenter describes another stage of consciousness between that of ordinary dreaming and wakefulness, a condition “in which the dreamer has a consciousness that he is dreaming, being aware of the unreliability of the images which present themselves before his mind. He may even make voluntary and successful efforts to prolong them if agreeable, or to dissipate them if unpleasing ; thus evincing a certain degree of that directing power, the entire want of which is characteristic of the true state of dreams.”
  • Can Dreams Be Controlled?-Facts prove that they can be, and to a remarkable extent. A large share of emissions occur in the state described by Dr. Carpenter, in which a certain amount of control by the will is possible. This is the usual condition of the mind during morning naps ; and if a person resolutely determines to combat unchaste thoughts whenever they come to him, whether asleep or awake, he will find it possible to control himself not only during this semi-conscious state, but even during more profound sleep.
  • A still greater control is exerted over the thoughts during seep by their character during hours of wakefulness. By controlling the mind during entire consciousness, it will also be controlled during unconsciousness or semi-consciousness.
    Dr. Acton makes the following very appropriate remarks of this subject:-
    “Patients will tell you that they ‘’cannot’’ control their dreams. This is not true. Those who have studied the connection between thoughts during waking hours and dreams during sleep know that they are loosely connected. The “character” is the same sleeping or waking. It is not surprising that, if a man has allowed his thoughts during the day to rest upon libidinous subjects, he should find his mind at night full of lascivious dreams-the one is a consequence of the other, and the nocturnal pollution is a natural consequence, particularly when diurnal indulgence has produced an irritability of the generative organs. A will which in our waking hours we have not exercised in repressing sexual desires, will not, when we fall asleep, preserve us from carrying the sleeping echo of our waking thought father then we dared to do in the day-time.”
  • One of the most important ways of understanding the unconscious—indeed, as Freud saw it, the royal road to discovering the nature of its contents—is the dream.
    • Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VII
  • I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C. (August 28, 1963); reported in the Congressional Record (April 18, 1968), vol. 114, p. 9165.
  • Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
    • Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). as translated by Michael Henry Heim; Part Two: Soul and Body, p. 59.

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  • The dream on the pillow,
    That flits with the day,
    The leaf of the willow
    A breath wears away;
    The dust on the blossom,
    The spray on the sea;
    Ay,—ask thine own bosom—
    Are emblems of thee.
  • I dreamed a dream, that I had flung a chain
    Of roses around Love, — I woke, and found
    I had chained Sorrow.
  • if after all this any one will be so sceptical as to distrust his senses, and to affirm that all we see and hear, feel and taste, think and do, during our whole being, is but the series and deluding appearances of a long dream, whereof there is no reality; and therefore will question the existence of all things, or our knowledge of anything: I must desire him to consider, that, if all be a dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the question, and so it is not much matter that a waking man should answer him. But yet, if he pleases, he may dream that I make him this answer,
    • Locke, John An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Book IV Of Knowledge And Probability
  • Dream, dream, let me dream,
    Wherefore should I waken,
    Sleep is as a fairy land
    Not yet by spells forsaken.
    Break not on the gentle charm
    In which night has bound me,
    Wherefore, wherefore should I wake
    To the cold world around me ?
  • All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
  • “Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.”
    “They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. “And they merely mean conscience.”

  • Imagine there's no countries,
    It isn't hard to do,
    Nothing to kill or die for,
    No religion too,
    Imagine all the people
    living life in peace...

    You may say I'm a dreamer,
    but I'm not the only one,
    I hope some day you'll join us,
    And the world will be as one.

  • It is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.
  • "It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon."

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  • There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.
    • Archibald MacLeish, "We Have Purpose … We All Know It", Life (May 30, 1960), p. 93. This was one of a series of essays in Life magazine and The New York Times on "The National Purpose."
  • To shuffle mutely over grey sidewalks/like the dark shadow of all bright lives,/and with the pennies I am given/buy myself a crazy, quiet dream/to play with
    • Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin translated from Yiddish by Shirley Kumove (2017)
  • The value of dreams, like … divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message.
    • Rollo May, The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 5 : The Delphic Oracle as Therapist, p. 106.
  • This research investigated laypeople's interpretation of their dreams. Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar waking thoughts (Studies 2 and 3). The meaningfulness attributed to specific dreams, however, was moderated by the extent to which the content of those dreams accorded with participants' preexisting beliefs--from the theories they endorsed to attitudes toward acquaintances, relationships with friends, and faith in God (Studies 3-6). Finally, dream content influenced judgment: Participants reported greater affection for a friend after considering a dream in which a friend protected rather than betrayed them (Study 5) and were equally reluctant to fly after dreaming or learning of a plane crash (Studies 2 and 3). Together, these results suggest that people engage in motivated interpretation of their dreams and that these interpretations impact their everyday lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
  • Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

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  • The dream censorship functions to preserve sleep by controlling the expression of unconscious wishes, and reventing the generation of unpleasant affect. The inhibition of affect...must be considered as the second consequence of the censorship of dreams, just as dream-distortion is its first consequence' It should be noted that while it is the censorship that necessitates dream distortion, the censorship itself does not actually carry out the distortion, This is done by the dream-work. The work of the censorship is merely to prevent unconscious wishes from entering the preconscious, or from linking up with preconscious wishes. Only if the unconscious wishes can be sufficiently disguised by the dream-work will the censorship permit the compromise formation to be experienced as part of the dream.
  • But the persistence of REM begs the question: Why is it so insistent? When rats are robbed of REM for four weeks they die (although the cause of death remains unknown). Amazingly, even though we spend about 27 years dreaming over the course of an average life, scientists still can't agree on why it's important.
    Psychiatrist Jerry Siegel, head of the Center for Sleep Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently proved that REM is nonexistent in some big-brained mammals, such as dolphins and whales. "Dying from lack of REM is totally bogus," Siegel says. "It's never been shown in any species other than a rat."
    Some theories suggest that REM helps regulate body temperature and neurotransmitter levels. And there is also evidence that dreaming helps us assimilate memories. Fetuses and babies spend 75 percent of their sleeping time in REM. Then again, platypuses experience more REM than any other animal and researchers wonder why, because, as Minnesota's Mahowald puts it, "Platypuses are stupid. What do they have to consolidate?"
    But, given that rats run through dream mazes that precisely match their lab mazes, others feel that there must be some purpose or meaningful information in dreams.
  • We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.
  • Our life is no dream, but it should and perhaps will become one.
    • Novalis, Fragmente I, "Magische Philosophie"

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  • The internal conversation knows as dreaming is no more an event limited to the hours of sleep than the existence of stars is limited to the hours of darkness. Stars become visible at night when their luminosity is no longer concealed by the glow of the sun. Similarly, the conversation with ourselves that in sleep we experience as dreaming continues unabated and undiluted in our waking life.
    • Thomas H. Ogden, Conversations on the Frontier of Dreaming

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  • You are walking on the earth as in a dream; Our world is a dream within a dream.
  • A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.
  • Tonight, may I get so drunk in love that
    I do not see any dreams!
  • The dream too thinks twice,
    gets filtered to go soft
    to be seated on children's eyes.
  • I salute my desires with a bow.,
    were it not for them to come and play
    mind would be empty just like me.
  • Still enveloped in a blanket of dreams
    my life continued to lie still, pretending as if
    it was in a deep slumber.
  • I felt I was getting enraged
    and losing my speech
    like them losing their dreams.
  • They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

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  • It is the quality and intensity of the dream only which raises men above the biological norm; and it is fidelity to the dream which differentiates the exceptional figure, the man of heroic stature, from the muddling, aimless mediocrities about him. What the dream is, matters not at all — it may be a dream of sainthood, kingship, love, art, asceticism or sensual pleasure — so long as it is fully expressed with all the resources of self.
  • When analyzing the elements of a dream we are, as a rule, not satisfied with the patient’s own statement that dream element X stands for experience Y. We strive rather to discern the particular reason or Y having chosen to express itself in terms of X. Through a clarification of the specifics of this choice, we hope for a deeper understanding of those details from which we can then reconstruct the formation and meaning of a symptom. In my opinion, this most circumspect examination of specific determinants must be accepted as one of the many ground rules of analytic work itself.
    • Wilhelm Reich, “Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation”, in “Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. 8, 1922; as qtd. in Wilhelm Reich, “Early Writings”, Vol. 1, (1975), p.125
  • Several theories claim that dreaming is a random by-product of REM sleep physiology and that it does not serve any natural function. Phenomenal dream content, however, is not as disorganized as such views imply. The form and content of dreams is not random but organized and selective: during dreaming, the brain constructs a complex model of the world in which certain types of elements, when* compared to waking life, are underrepresented whereas others are over represented. Furthermore, dream content is consistently and powerfully modulated by certain types of waking experiences. On the basis of this evidence, I put forward the hypothesis that the biological function of dreaming is to simulate threatening events, and to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance. To evaluate this hypothesis, we need to consider the original evolutionary context of dreaming and the possible traces it has left in the dream content of the present human population. In the ancestral environment human life was short and full of threats. Any behavioral advantage in dealing with highly dangerous events would have increased the probability of reproductive success. A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again in various combinations would have been valuable for the development and maintenance of threat-avoidance skills. Empirical evidence from normative dream content, children's dreams, recurrent dreams, nightmares, post traumatic dreams, and the dreams of hunter-gatherers indicates that our dream-production mechanisms are in fact specialized in the simulation of threatening events, and thus provides support to the threat simulation hypothesis of the function of dreaming.
  • Still speaking of dreams, Seth says: "Energy projected into any kind of construction, psychic or physical, cannot be recalled, but must follow the laws of the particular form into which it has been for the moment molded. Therefore, when the dreamer contracts his multi-realistic objects backward, ending for himself the dream he has constructed, he ends it for himself only. The reality of the dream continues." The energy, as Seth explains it, can be transformed, but not annihilated.
  • Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs.

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  • The republic is a dream
    Nothing happens unless first a dream.
    • Carl Sandburg, "Washington Monument by Night," stanza 4, in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, rev. and expanded ed. (1970), p. 282. Ronald Reagan quoted this before a joint session of Congress (April 28, 1981), and added: "As Carl Sandburg said, all we need to begin with is a dream that we can do better than before. All we need to have is faith, and that dream will come true. All we need to do is act, and the time for action is now". Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981, p. 394.
  • No matter how frequently you visit the realm of dreams, you will inevitably confront the unvarnished truth. However, our truth is so much bitter that not even the entirety of the world's sugar can sweeten it.
  • I have no need for the boundless sky; the moon and stars are beyond my grasp. I prefer to exist in the real world, for dreams alone cannot sustain me.
  • If you ever become fatigued from chasing your dreams, you are always welcome in my world of reality.
  • May there be no unfulfilled dreams like this
    may there be realities that satisfy me.
  • It may be that "dreaming," too, should be understood this way, as sustaining the objectifying power of people during hours when they are cut off from the natural source of objects, so that they do not during sleep drown in their own corporeal engulfment. That is, the particular content of dreams (now terrifying, now benign; now full of uncanny secret intelligence about the sleeper, now ignorant, arbitrary, and nonsensical) is itself insignificant beside the overall fact of the dreaming itself, the emergency work of the imagination to provide an object - this object, that object, any object - to sustain and to exercise the capacity for self-objectification during the sleep-filled hours of sweet and dangerous bodily absorption.
    • Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985)
  • Although the variability of dream content is large, typical dream themes that occur quite often and are reported by many people can be identified (e.g., being chased, falling, flying, failing an examination, being unable to find a toilet or restroom). The present study is an investigation of the stability of the rank order of the dream themes and of gender differences in the content of dreams. The authors administered A. L. Zadra and T. A. Nielsen's (1997) Typical Dream Questionnaire to 444 participants. The findings indicated that most of the 55 dream themes occurred at least once in most of the participants' lifetimes. In addition, the correlation coefficients for the rank order of the themes were very high; that is, the relative frequencies were stable. The gender differences in the present study were in line with content analytic findings; for example, men reported dreams about physical aggression more often than did women. Overall, previous research and the present data indicate that available research results of the measurement of typical dream themes are reliable and valid. The question of the meaning of these themes or the relationship between typical dream contents and waking life experiences, however, has not yet been answered and is open to future research.
    • Michael Schredl; Petra Ciric; Simon Götz; Lutz Wittmann (November 2004). "Typical Dreams: Stability and Gender Differences". The Journal of Psychology. 138 (6): 485–94. doi:10.3200/JRLP.138.6.485-494. PMID 15612605.
  • But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be.
  • I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.
  • It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream—and if we don't respond to it—we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us—or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.
  • I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
  • To die, to sleep;
    To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub:
    For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
    When we have shuffled off this mortal coil..."
  • There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
    That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs.
  • In your dream no one is a refugee.
    Everyone has clean sheets.
  • Dreams which give timely notice of coming accidents are, unfortunately, quite as often useless as they are efficacious for the protection of those to whom they are sent. Mr. Kendall, from whose psychical diary I have often quoted, sends me the following story of a dream... His class-leader there had lost a leg, and he had heard direct from himself the circumstances under which the loss took place and the dream that accompanied. This class-leader was a blacksmith at a manufacturing mill which was driven by a water-wheel... one night he dreamed that at the close of the day's work the manager detained him to repair it, that his foot slipped and became entangled between the two wheels, and was injured and afterwards amputated... The blacksmith determined to make himself scarce before the hour arrived... He found himself ere he was aware of it back at the mill just as the workpeople were being dismissed. He could not escape, and as he was principal smith he had to go upon the wheel, but he resolved to be very careful. In spite of his care, however, his foot slipped and got entangled between the two wheels just as he had dreamed. It was crushed so badly that he had to be carried to the Bradford Infirmary, where the leg was amputated above the knee. The premonitory dream was thus fulfilled throughout.
  • It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it. Dream is akin to aspiration. And aspiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision. And an enigmatic vision in the emphatic sense is the perception of the ultimate mystery, of the truth of the ultimate mystery.
  • “You have the look of one who has lately dreamed.”
    “Perhaps I have,” Elric said.
    “A fair dream, I hope.”
    “Too fair to be anything other than a dream.”
  • The greatest man of action is he who is the greatest, and a life-long, dreamer. For in him the dreamer is fortified against destruction by a far-seeing eye, a virile mind, a strong will, a robust courage.
    And so has perished the kindly dreamer — on the cross or in the garret.
    A democracy should not let its dreamers perish. They are its life, its guaranty against decay.
    • Louis Sullivan, Education (1902), First read before the Architectural League of America, Toronto (1902), later published in Kindergarten Chats (revised 1918) and Other Writings (1947).
  • You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
    • George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, act I, in Selected Plays with Prefaces (1949), vol. 2, p. 7. The serpent says these words to Eve. John F. Kennedy quoted this line in his address to the Irish Parliament, Dublin (June 28, 1963); Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 537. Robert F. Kennedy used a similar quotation as a theme of his 1968 campaign for the presidential nomination: "Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not." Ted Kennedy quoted this variation in delivering Robert F. Kennedy's eulogy in 1968; reported in The New York Times (June 9, 1968), p. 56.

T

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  • Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
  • In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.
    But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.
  • If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
  • When the brain in not functioning properly during dreams of aggression, sleepwalkers have been able to commit murder. In several cases sleepwalkers did not recognize their victims. For example, one man drove 15 kilometers to his mother-in-law’s house, which means that his motor skills were intact. Then he stabbed her with a knife and did not respond to her screams. He acted as if he was under threat and initiated a fatal attack. This man had a genetic and personal history of awakening abruptly from the first cycle of sleep into a confused state and never entered REM sleep (Cartwright, 2000). The REM sleep is necessary to prevent waking hallucinations and mental illness (Siegel, 2001).
    Since aggression is prominent in most dreams, it is likely that our enemies cause this aggression. In a study by Hall and Van de Castle, animals and male strangers are the primary enemies in both male and female dreams. When a animal enters a dream it is almost always going to pose some threat or danger to the dreamer. The reason for this was thought to be because in ancestral times humans lived in an environment full of dangerous animals. There was also a constant threat from other humans. These ever-present dangers made behavioral strategies to avoid contact with these things and was of a high survival value. Dreaming simulates these strategies in order to maintain efficiency; otherwise, one failure to respond to these threats in waking life could mean death. Dreams are biased towards simulating threats that were common in our ancestral environment (Revonsuo, 2000).

V

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  • Postremo nemo aegrotus quidquam somniat tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus.
    • No sick man's monstrous dream can be so wild that some philosopher won't say it's true.
    • Marcus Terentius Varro Eumenides, fragment 6, from Saturae Menippeae; translation from J. Wight Duff Roman Satire: Its Outlook on Social Life (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964) p. 90.
  • The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.
    • Swami Vivekananda, in a letter from New York to Mary Hale (10 February 1896), as published in Complete Works, 5.100.

W

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  • As I became accustomed to keeping dream records, the dreams themselves got "better", with more direct information and precognitive "hits."
  • Each day for 14 weeks, 193 college students indicated whether or not they remembered a dream from the previous evening; they also recorded their sleep schedules and noted whether they had (1) exercised and (2) consumed alcohol and caffeine. In addition, the students completed measures of dissociation, schizotypy, sleep-related experiences, and the five-factor model of personality (N=169). Analyses of these data indicated that individual differences in dream recall were strongly stable over a 2-month interval. Dream recall was specifically associated with openness and was unrelated to the other Big Five traits. Subsequent analyses indicated that individuals who are prone to absorption, imagination and fantasy are particularly likely to remember their dreams and to report other vivid nocturnal experiences. These results are consistent with a salience model of dream recall and a continuity model of human consciousness.
  • A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
  • No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Y

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  • I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
    Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
  • Things we do and things we see shortly before we fall asleep are most apt to influence our dreams.

Z

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  • Questionnaire studies indicate that approximately 80% of adults answer positively to the question “Have you ever dreamed of sexual experiences?” with men reporting sexual dreams more often than women. The normative data from the classic HVDC studies indicates that 12% of men’ dreams and 4% of women’s dreams contained sexual content, including having or attempting intercourse, petting, kissing, sexual overtures and fantasies.
    However, one study by our group of over 3500 dream reports found no gender differences, with approximately 8% of dream reports from both men and women containing sexually-related activity. The differences with the HVDC data may be partially due to sample composition (college students versus student and non-student adults).
    Alternatively, it is also possible that women actually experience more sexual dreams now than they did 40 years ago, or that they now feel more comfortable reporting such dreams due to changing social roles and attitudes, or both.
  • Observed gender differences may be indicative of different waking needs, experiences, desires and attitudes with respect to sexuality. This is consistent with the continuity hypothesis of dreaming which postulates that the content of everyday dreams reflects the dreamer's waking states and concerns -- that is, that dream and waking thought contents are continuous."
  • Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.
    • As translated by Lin Yutang; Alternate translations:
      Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a fluttering butterfly. What fun he had, doing as he pleased! He did not know he was Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and found himself to be Zhou. He did not know whether Zhou had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly had dreamed he was Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction. This is what is meant by the transformation of things.
      One night, Zhuangzi dreamed of being a butterfly — a happy butterfly, showing off and doing things as he pleased, unaware of being Zhuangzi. Suddenly he awoke, drowsily, Zhuangzi again. And he could not tell whether it was Zhuangzi who had dreamt the butterfly or the butterfly dreaming Zhuangzi. But there must be some difference between them! This is called 'the transformation of things'.
    • Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi.
  • How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 201-04.
  • When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
    And in a dream as in a fairy bark
    Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
    To purple daybreak—little thought we pay
    To that sweet bitter world we know by day.
  • If there were dreams to sell,
    Merry and sad to tell,
    And the crier rung his bell,
    What would you buy?
  • "Come to me, darling; I'm lonely without thee;
    Daytime and nighttime I'm dreaming about thee."
  • Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate,
    For morning dreams, as poets tell, are true.
  • I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,
    With vassals and serfs at my side.
  • I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
  • And dreams in their development have breath,
    And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
    They have a weight upon our waking thoughts,
    They take a weight from off our waking toils,
    They do divide our being.
  • A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
  • The fisher droppeth his net in the stream,
    And a hundred streams are the same as one;
    And the maiden dreameth her love-lit dream;
    And what is it all, when all is done?
    The net of the fisher the burden breaks,
    And always the dreaming the dreamer wakes.
  • Like the dreams,
    Children of night, of indigestion bred.
  • And so, his senses gradually wrapt
    In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds,
    And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark;
    That singest like an angel in the clouds.
  • Dreams are but interludes, which fancy makes;
    When monarch reason sleeps, this mimic wakes.
  • In blissful dream, in silent night,
    There came to me, with magic might,
    With magic might, my own sweet love,
    Into my little room above.
  • Fly, dotard, fly!
    With thy wise dreams and fables of the sky.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book II, line 207. Pope's translation.
  • Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams,
    Unnatural and full of contradictions;
    Yet others of our most romantic schemes
    Are something more than fictions.
  • And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste
    Shall others continue, but never complete.
    For none upon earth can achieve his scheme;
    The best as the worst are futile here:
    We wake at the self-same point of the dream,—
    All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.
  • Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
    Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.
  • Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.
    • Joel, II. 28.
  • There's a long, long trail a-winding
    Into the land of my dreams,
    Where the nightingales are singing
    And a white moon beams;
    There's a long, long night of waiting
    Until my dreams all come true,
    Till the day when I'll be going down that
    Long, long trail with you.
    • Stoddard King, There's a Long, Long Trail. (Popular in the Great War).
  • Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming,
    Thy gentle voice my spirit can cheer.
  • 'Twas but a dream,—let it pass,—let it vanish like so many others!
    What I thought was a flower is only a weed, and is worthless.
  • Is this is a dream? O, if it be a dream,
    Let me sleep on, and do not wake me yet!
  • Ground not upon dreams, you know they are ever contrary.
  • I believe it to be true that Dreams are the true Interpreters of our Inclinations; but there is Art required to sort and understand them.
  • One of those passing rainbow dreams,
    Half light, half shade, which fancy's beams
    Paint on the fleeting mists that roll,
    In trance or slumber, round the soul!
    • Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), Fire Worshippers, Stanza 54.
  • Oh! that a dream so sweet, so long enjoy'd,
    Should be so sadly, cruelly destroy'd!
    • Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Stanza 62.
  • A thousand creeds and battle cries,
    A thousand warring social schemes,
    A thousand new moralities
    And twenty thousand, thousand dreams.
  • I am weary of planning and toiling
    In the crowded hives of men;
    Heart weary of building and spoiling
    And spoiling and building again;
    And I long for the dear old river
    Where I dreamed my youth away;
    For a dreamer lives forever,
    And a toiler dies in a day.
  • Namque sub Aurora jam dormitante lucerna Somnia quo cerni tempore vera solent.
    • Those dreams are true which we have in the morning, as the lamp begins to flicker.
    • Ovid, Epistles, XIX. Hero Leandro. 195.
  • Dreams, which, beneath the hov'ring shades of night,
    Sport with the ever-restless minds of men,
    Descend not from the gods. Each busy brain
    Creates its own.
  • What was your dream?
    It seemed to me that a woman in white raiment, graceful and fair to look upon, came towards me and calling me by name said:
    On the third day, Socrates, thou shall reach the coast of fertile Phthia.
  • That holy dream—that holy dream,
    While all the world were chiding,
    Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
    A lonely spirit guiding.
  • You are not wrong, who deem
    That my days have been a dream;
    Yet if hope has flown away
    In a night, or in a day,
    In a vision, or in none,
    Is it therefore the less gone?
    All that we see or seem
    Is but a dream within a dream.
  • O God! Can I not save
    One from the pitiless wave?
    Is all that we see or seem
    But a dream within a dream?
  • Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
    Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
  • Yet eat in dreams, the custard of the day.
  • Till their own dreams at length deceive 'em
    And oft repeating, they believe 'em.
  • As a dream when one awaketh.
    • Psalms. LXXIII. 20.
  • This morn, as sleeping in my bed I lay,
    I dreamt (and morning dreams come true they say).
    • W. B. Rhodes, Bombastes Furioso. Post medium noctean bisus, quum comnia vera. Horace, Satires, Book I. Sat. 10, line 33. Tibullus, Elegy, Book III. 4.
  • We must discipline ourselves to convert dreams into plans, and plans into goals, and goals into those small daily activities that will lead us, one sure step at a time, toward a better future.
    • Jim Rohn, Five Major Pieces To the Life Puzzle (1991).
  • O Brethren, weep to-day,
    The silent God hath quenched my Torch's ray,
    And the vain dream hath flown.
  • Some must delve when the dawn is nigh;
    Some must toil when the noonday beams;
    But when night comes, and the soft winds sigh,
    Every man is a King of Dreams.
  • I'll dream no more—by manly mind
    Not even in sleep is well resigned.
    My midnight orisons said o'er,
    I'll turn to rest and dream no more.
  • Thou hast beat me out
    Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
    Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me.
  • Oh! I have pass'd a miserable night,
    So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams,
    That, as I am a Christian faithful man,
    I would not spend another such a night,
    Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days.
  • For never yet one hour in his bed
    Have I enjoyed the golden dew of sleep,
    But have been waked by his timorous dreams.
  • I talk of dreams,
    Which are the children of an idle brain,
    Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
    Which is as thin of substance as the air
    And more inconstant than the wind.
  • Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
    And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
    Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
    Of healths five-fathom deep.
  • If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,
    My dreams presage some joyful news at hand:
    My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne;
    And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit
    Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
  • We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on, and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep.
  • Ah, the strange, sweet, lonely delight
    Of the Valleys of Dream.
  • Across the silent stream
    Where the dream-shadows go,
    From the dim blue Hill of Dream
    I have heard the west wind blow.
  • In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
  • Those dreams, that on the silent night intrude,
    And with false flitting shades our minds delude,
    Jove never sends us downward from the skies;
    Nor can they from infernal mansions rise;
    But are all mere productions of the brain,
    And fools consult interpreters in vain.
  • In the world of dreams, I have chosen my part.
    To sleep for a season and hear no word
    Of true love's truth or of light love's art,
    Only the song of a secret bird.
  • The dream
    Dreamed by a happy man, when the dark East,
    Unseen, is brightening to his bridal morn.
  • Seeing, I saw not, hearing not, I heard.
    Tho', if I saw not, yet they told me all
    So often that I spake as having seen.
  • The chambers in the house of dreams
    Are fed with so divine an air,
    That Time's hoar wings grow young therein,
    And they who walk there are most fair.
  • And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
    Call to the soul when man doth sleep.
    So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted dreams,
    And into glory peep.
  • Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream.


Dreams: What They Are and How They Are Caused, by C.W. Leadbeater, (1898)

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(Full text online pdf)

  • The most convenient method in which we can arrange the various branches of our subject will perhaps be the following: first, to consider rather carefully the mechanism — physical, etheric and astral — by means of which impressions are conveyed to our consciousness; secondly, to see how the consciousness in its turn affects and uses this mechanism; thirdly, to note the condition both of the consciousness and its mechanism during sleep; and fourthly, to enquire how the various kinds of dreams which men experience are thereby produced. Chapter 1: Introductory
  • As I am writing in the main for students of theosophy, I shall feel myself at liberty to use, without detailed explanation, the ordinary theosophical terms, with which I may safely assume them to be familiar, since otherwise my little book would far exceed its allotted limits. Should it, however, fall into the hands of any to whom the occasional use of such terms constitutes a difficulty, I can only apologize to them, and refer them for these preliminary explanations to any elementary theosophical work, such as Mrs Besant's "The Ancient Wisdom", or "Man and his Bodies". Ch 1: Intro
  • Physical. First, then, as to the physical part of the mechanism. We have in our bodies a great central axis of nervous matter, ending in the brain, and from this a network of nerve-threads radiates in every direction through the body. It is these nerve-threads, according to modern scientific theory, which by their vibrations convey all impressions from without to the brain, and the latter, upon receipts of these impressions, translates them into sensations or perceptions; so that if I put my hand upon some object and find it to be hot, it is really not my hand that feels, but my brain, which is acting upon information transmitted to it by the vibrations running along its telegraph wires, the nerve-threads. Chapter 2: The Mechanism
  • Etheric. It is not alone through the brain to which we have hitherto been referring, however, that impressions may be received by the man. Almost exactly co-extensive with and interpenetrating its visible form is his etheric double (formerly called in theosophical literature the linga sharira), and that also has a brain which is really no less physical than the other, though composed of matter in a condition finer than the gaseous. Ch 2
  • Astral. Still another mechanism that we have to take into account is the astral body, often called the desire-body. As its name implies, this vehicle is composed exclusively of astral matter, and is, in fact, the expression of the man on the astral plane, just as his physical body is the expression of him on the lower levels of the physical plane. Ch 2
  • All these different portions of the mechanism are in reality merely instruments of the ego [higher self/soul], though his control of them is as yet often very imperfect; for it must always be remembered that the ego is himself a developing entity, and that in the case of most of us he is scarcely more than a germ of what he is to be one day. Chapter 3: The Ego
  • A stanza in the Book of Dzyan tells us: 'Those who received but a spark remained destitute of knowledge: the spark burned low'; and Madame Blavatsky explains that 'those who receive but a spark constitute the average humanity which have to acquire their intellectuality during the present manvantaric evolution'. ( The Secret Doctrine, ii, 167, 1979 ed.). In the case of most of them that spark is still smouldering, and it will be many an age before its slow increase brings it to the stage of steady and brilliant flame. Ch 3: The Ego
  • Clairvoyant observation bears abundant testimony to the fact that when a man falls into a deep slumber the higher principles in their astral vehicle almost invariably withdraw from the body and hover in its immediate neighbourhood. Indeed, it is the process of this withdrawal which we commonly call 'going to sleep'. Chapter 4: The Condition of Sleep
  • I do not wish here to discuss the question, intensely interesting though it be, as to whether time can be said really to exist, or whether it is but a limitation of this lower consciousness, and all that we call time — past, present and future alike — is 'but one eternal Now'; I wish only to show that when the ego is freed from physical trammels, either during sleep, trance or death, he appears to employ some transcendental measure of time which has nothing in common with our ordinary physiological one. A hundred stories might be told to prove this fact... Ch 4
  • It seems that in the Koran there is a wonderful narrative concerning a visit paid one morning by the prophet Mohammed to heaven, during which he saw many different regions there, had them all very fully explained to him, and also had numerous lengthy conferences with various angels; yet when he returned to his body, the bed from which he had risen was still warm, and he found that but a few seconds had passed — in fact, I believe the water had not yet all run out from a jug which he had accidentally overturned as he started on the expedition! Ch 4
  • The teacher... and credited with miraculous powers, undertook to prove... to the doubting monarch that the story was, at any rate, not impossible. He had... the sultan just to dip his head into the water and... and to his intense surprise found himself at once in a place entirely unknown to him — on a lonely shore, near the foot of a great mountain... time passed on; he began to get hungry... After wandering about for some time, he found some men at work felling trees in a wood, and applied to them for assistance. They... eventually took him with them to the town where they lived. Here he resided and worked for some years, gradually amassing money, and at length contrived to marry a rich wife... he spent many happy years... bringing up a family of no less than fourteen children... One day, walking by the sea-side, he... plunged into the sea for a bath; and as he raised his head and shook the water from his eyes, he was astounded to find himself standing among his old courtiers, with his teacher of long ago at his side, and a basin of water before him. It was long... before he could be brought to believe that all those years of incident and adventure had been nothing but one moment's dream, caused by the hypnotic suggestion of his teacher, and that really he had done nothing but dip his head quickly into the basin of water... Chapter 4
  • The Prophetic Dream... Often the prophecy is evidently intended as a warning, and instances are not wanting in which that warning has been taken, and so the dreamer has been saved from injury or death. In most cases the hint is neglected, or its true signification not understood until the fulfillment comes. In others an attempt is made to act upon the suggestion, but nevertheless circumstances over which the dreamer has no control bring him in spite of himself into the position foretold. Stories of such prophetic dreams are so common that the reader may easily find some in almost any of the books on such subjects. Chapter 5: Dreams
  • The Confused Dream... by far the commonest of all, may be caused... in various ways. It may be simply a more or less perfect recollection of a series of the disconnected pictures and impossible transformations produced by the senseless automatic action of the lower physical brain; it may be a reproduction of the stream of casual thought which has been pouring through the etheric part of the brain; if sensual images of any kind enter into it, it is due to the ever-restless tide of earthly desire, probably stimulated by some unholy influence of the astral world; it may be due to an imperfect attempt at dramatization on the part of an undeveloped ego; or it may be (and most often is) due to an inextricable mingling of several or all of these influences. Ch 5
  • The first experiment tried was with an average man of small education and rough exterior — a man of the Australian shepherd type — whose astral form, as seen floating above his body, was externally little more than a shapeless wreath of mist. It was found that the consciousness of the body on the bed was dull and heavy, both as regards the grosser and the etheric parts of the frame. The former responded to some extent to external stimuli — for example, the sprinkling of two or three drops of water on the face called up in the brain (though somewhat tardily) a picture of a heavy shower of rain; while the etheric part of the brain was as usual a passive channel for an endless stream of disconnected thoughts, it rarely responded to any of the vibrations they produced, and even when it did it seemed somewhat sluggish in its action. Chapter 6 - Experiments on the Dream-State
  • Surely these experiments show very clearly how the remembrance of our dreams becomes so chaotic and inconsequent as it frequently is. Incidentally they also explain why some people — in whom the ego is undeveloped and earthly desires of various kinds are strong — never dream at all, and why many others are only now and then, under a collocation of favourable circumstances, able to bring back a confused memory of nocturnal adventure; and we see, further, from them that if a man wishes to reap in his waking consciousness the benefit of what his ego [higher self/soul] may learn during sleep, it is absolutely necessary for him to acquire control over his thoughts, to subdue all lower passions, and to attune his mind to higher things. Chapter 7 Conclusion
  • Another point very strongly brought out in our further investigations is the immense importance of the last thought in a man's mind as he sinks to sleep. This is a consideration which never occurs to the vast majority of people at all, yet it affects them physically, mentally, and morally. Ch 7 Conclusion
  • All earnest Theosophists should therefore make a special point of raising their thoughts to the loftiest level of which they are capable before allowing themselves to sink into slumber. For remember, through what seem at first but the portals of dream, entrance may perchance presently be gained into those grander realms where alone true vision is possible. Ch 7 Conclusion
  • If one guides his soul persistently upward, its inner senses will at last begin to unfold; the light within the shrine will burn brighter and brighter, until at last the full continuous consciousness comes, and then he will dream no more. To lie down to sleep will no longer mean for him to sink into oblivion, but simply to step forth radiant, rejoicing, strong, into that fuller, nobler life where fatigue can never come — where the soul is always learning, even though all his time be spent in service; for the service is that of the great Masters of Wisdom, and the glorious task They set before him is to help ever to the fullest limit of his power in Their never-ceasing work for the aiding and the guidance of the evolution of humanity. Ch 7 Conclusion
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