Dreaming Quotes

“J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I’ve heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures’ myths, and maybe that was true. I don’t know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.

Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.”
― Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

“You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge : Volume II 1801-1806

“Oh, to awake from dreaming!”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Really, nobody was there?” I asked.
“Well, nobody important,” he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“In Wirklichkeit war ich schon wach, aber ich hielt noch die Augen zu, um die Traaumgestalten noch länger vor meiner Seele zu behalten.”
― Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte

“To every dreamer, you direct the light of all the world!”
― Tamara Henson

“Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.”
― Anna Akhmatova

“Frequent reflection on this subject, moreover, inclines me to the belief that this reluctance to exchange the darkness of the womb for the light of day is connected to my extraordinary gift and passion for sleep.”
― Thomas Mann

“Julius was lost in a dream, he was nothing, he was no one [...] He would never be touched, he was the flight of a bird, the shadow of a flower; he was the river bed and the desert sand and the snow upon the mountains.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius

“Dreams are a different level of awareness, ranging from ego ranting to dimensional doorways.”
― Donna Goddard, Geboor: Spiritual Fiction

“The second attention is available to all of us, but, by willfully holding on to our half-cocked rationality, some of us more fiercely than others, keep the second attention at arm’s length.

His idea was that dreaming brings down the barriers that surround and insulate the second attention.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming

“Seeing children's assemblage points constantly fluttering, as if moved by tremors, changing their place with ease, the old sorcerers came to the conclusion that the assemblage points habitual location is not innate but brought about by habituation.

Seeing also that only in adults is it fixed on one spot, they surmised that the specific location of the assemblage point fosters a specific way of perceiving.

Through usage, this specific way of perceiving becomes a system of interpreting sensory data.

Since we are drafted into that system by being born into it, from the moment of our birth we imperatively strive to adjust our perceiving to conform to the demands of this system, a system that rules us for life.

Consequently, the old sorcerers were thoroughly right in believing that the act of countermanding it and perceiving energy directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming

“If we choose to recondition our interpretation system, reality becomes fluid, and the scope of what can be real is enhanced without endangering the integrity of reality.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming

“It was a game for children, nothing more than impossible dreams and fantasies. And yet, isn't that often how the future is created? In the minds of children and dreamers?”
― Scott Snyder, Batman: Gates of Gotham

“When you tap into your ability to dream and use your imagination it's the highest high you will ever achieve. The experience is euphoric, out of this world... butterflies..”
― Niedria Kenny

“The world men dream of," replied Ghazali, "is the world they try to make.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“When your dream is at stake, be the best friend of persistence and resilience. Nothing can hinder the deepest desire of our souls.”
― Daniel Gumiero

“Don't let anyone, including yourself, prevent you from achieving your dreams now.”
― Daniel Gumiero

“Dreaming is desirable.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“You were thinking about how suburbs are perfect cradles for dreaming: they practically beg you to imagine another life, one lived at a burning voltage. The dreaming hidden in this place - murmuring beneath the comfort of the uniform gardens in their perfect rows, the mowed lawns, each driveway that bit too small for the two large cars you couldn't have become what you are if you hadn't always been from this.”
― Colin Walsh, Kala

“You’ll find me at the narthex
Dreaming of praying at the apex -”
― Isbelle Razors

“... and what is a dream?
.
a dip inside
space beyond
Why would I mind?
Do you?”
― Julia Duclos, Helmet: a Bunch of Poems

“Stop talking bout your dreams, wake up and work on it.”
― Jordan Hoechlin

“Day draws towards twilight:
I dream idly,
Heavy with longings.”
― Elsa Gidlow, Sapphic Songs: Eighteen to Eighty

“Duyguları ve hayatı muhafaza eden, ruhun potansiyellerini idareli kullanan, afyon dozunu Goethe gibi ayarlayabilene ne mutlu! Bu kişilerde hâkim olan hayal gücüdür yalnız, duygu değil. Byron, Schiller, Camões, Tasso genç öldü; kalpleri öldürdü onları. Homeros ile Goethe, Sofokles ile Voltaire yaşlılıktan öldü; hayal gücü besliyordu onları, yaşamları harcanmadı, zira hayal gücü duyguları harcamaz.

Hayal etmek düş görmektir: Hayat bu sırada uyuyup dinlenir; hissetmek aktifçe yaşamaktır: Yorar, tüketir.”
― Almeida Garrett, Viagens na Minha Terra

“Wakeless, Elm dreamed in yellow.”
― Rachel Gillig, Two Twisted Crowns

“Out of the myriad events that take place during a typical day, we select information to remember based on its emotional intensity. During sleep, this information is both consolidated into long-term memory and integrated into existent memory, while the emotionality attached to the memory is assimilated and fades over time. It is as if a major purpose of emotion is to tag an event as something important for us to remember, and once this purpose is served, the emotion can attenuate.”
― Leslie Ellis, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Implementing Simple and Effective Dreamwork

“Well, Humpty Dumpty is one of the keenest arguers I know... he almost had me convinced that I had no valid reason to be sure that I was awake... It took me about three hours, but I finally convinced him that I must be awake, and so he conceded that I had won the argument. And then--."
The King did not finish his sentence and stood lost in thought.
"And then what?" asked Alice.
"And then I woke up!" said the King, a bit sheepishly.”
― Raymond M. Smullyan, Alice in Puzzle-Land