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Dreams

  • Dreams are large possessions ... they are an expansion of life, an enlightenment, and a discipline. I thank God for my dream life; my daily life would be far poorer, if it wanted the second sight of dreams.

  • Who knows what part we play in other people's dreams?

  • People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in 'em as food.

  • The day will probably come when you can tell everything about a person from his dreams except his age and weight.

  • For most of us, dreams come true only after they do not matter. Only in childhood do we ever have the chance of making dreams come true when they mean everything.

  • Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking!

  • What would be achieved ever if people lost the ability to dream?

  • She began to dream ... a little ... again. Her dream tools was rusty, unused for years and years, but found to be still workin after awhile.

  • If the dreams of any so-called normal man were exposed ... there would be no more gravity and dignity left for mankind.

  • All we can do is dream, or die, / dream that we do not die / and, at times, for a moment, wake.

    • Rosario Castellanos,
    • "Nocturne," in Magda Bogin, trans., The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos ()
  • The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

  • There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely.

  • I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

  • There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream — whatever the dream might be.

  • The dream was always running ahead of one. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

  • In my dreams I sleep with everybody.

    • Anaïs Nin,
    • 1933, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 1 ()
  • ... dreams are necessary to life ...

    • Anaïs Nin,
    • 1936, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 2 ()
  • Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

    • Anaïs Nin,
    • 1946, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 4 ()
  • ... gold never comes to the dreamers — except in dreams.

    • Anaïs Nin,
    • 1924, Linotte, the Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 3 ()
  • ... dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

  • People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.

  • The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.

  • When we can't dream any longer, we die.

    • Emma Goldman,
    • speech, in Margaret Anderson, "The Immutable," The Little Review ()
  • Don't be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality.

    • Belva Davis,
    • in Belva Davis with Vicki Haddock, Never in My Wildest Dreams ()
  • I wonder if when you dream about somebody they dream about you.

  • Dreams are the subtle Dower / That make us rich an Hour — / Then fling us poor / Out of the purple Door ...

    • Emily Dickinson,
    • c. 1876, in Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson ()
  • I have to tell you what I've learned, that I know now / what happens to the dreamers. / They don't feel it when they change. One day / they wake, they dress, they are old.

  • All my air castles have melted like snow, / all my dreams have run off like water, / all that remains of what I've ever loved / is a blue sky and some pale stars.

    • Edith Södergran,
    • "Nordic Spring" (1916), in Stina Katchadourian, trans., Love and Solitude ()
  • Dreaming is the poorest of all grindstones on which to sharpen the wits. There is only one thing to do: have a fixed purpose and stick to it.

  • It is necessary that we dream now and then. No one ever achieved anything from the smallest to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.

  • So the dream is continually reminding us of the part which our conscious is forgetting. It does not speak with any absolute authority; it simply gives a true picture of a situation which exists in the unconscious. It speaks truth; but not, as some persons believe, the truth. It shows the other side.

  • ... dreams are, by definition, cursed with short lifespans.

  • There are some wiser in their sleeping than in their waking.

  • ... like all Americans they had a rich fund of dreams. Lacking real capital they had drawn heavily on their fantasy accounts.

  • She ... marveled at the strangeness and mystery of dreams, in which the dreamer is at the same time both inventor and surprised spectator.

  • Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?

  • ... people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

  • ... it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. ... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

  • If we don't dream we go insane. Each of us chooses ways to understand their purpose.

  • Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

  • I believe that our dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them.

  • in the middle of the night / people tell their dreams / and it is important, even / though there is never much / of an audience.

  • Dreams the sources of action, the meeting and the end, / a resting-place among the flight of things.

  • Without a vision human beings are nasty creatures.

  • Dreams function to help us jump tracks.

    • Jenny Read,
    • 1973, in Kathleen Doyle, ed., Jenny Read: In Pursuit of Art and Life ()
  • Nothing in the world was ever built without a dream at the beginning.

  • A vision is something you see and others don't. Some people would say that's a pocket definition of lunacy. But it also defines entrepreneurial spirit.

  • it is not ugly to dream in life / but it is ugly to make life a dream.

  • 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 color of my mind.

  • I dreamt one dark and stormy night / When winter winds were wild ...

    • Emily Brontë,
    • 1837, in Clement Shorter, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë ()
  • Dreams are perhaps the ultimate personal creation ...

  • ... dreams must not take the place of actual life, nor constitute themselves a cowardly escape from it, but become rather a sanctuary in which the overdriven mind and nerves may take refuge, a country on the outer edge of this confusion, bright with the shadow of eternity beyond.

  • Dreams are only the image of outward things shown on an inward mirror. But the mirror is the soul's enclosing darkness.

  • Dreamers who regard dreams as important and even vital to success in life will receive and remember helpful dreams.

  • We spend about 20 percent of our total sleep time in a dream state. For most of us, this means we dream one and a half hours each night or, on the average, spend four years of our lifetime in a dream state.

  • Whatever our problems are, dreams can provide novel ideas and sometimes magnificent resolutions.

  • ... I escape into that trance that memory shares with arousal. The same buzz in the blood, the reprieve, once more, from real time. That ecstatic condition the scientists call 'alpha,' and psychologists know as 'flow.' I still enjoy these transports of delight, the near-optical illusion as the outer world recedes and the inner world is allowed to take over: powerful, illogical. The radiance of the daydream.

  • Wishing and dreaming are the beginning of all human endeavor.

  • ... my dreams were all my own. I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed, my dearest pleasure when free.

  • ... a daydreamer is prepared for most things ...

  • Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

    • Alice James,
    • in Leon Edel, ed., The Diary of Alice James ()
  • And it's a risky thing to talk about one's most secret dreams a bit too early.

  • Yet keep within your heart / A place apart / Where little dreams may go, / May thrive and grow. / Hold fast — hold fast your dreams!

    • Louise Driscoll,
    • "Hold Fast Your Dreams," in Hazel Felleman, ed., The Best Loved Poems of the American People ()
  • It was always the dream of my childhood to sit upon an iceberg with a bear.

    • Jane Harrison,
    • in Jessie G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait From Letters ()
  • Anyway, all I need to know / I learn in my dreams ...

    • Faye Scott Rieger,
    • "The Circus of Levitation," in Marilyn Sewell, ed., Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry ()
  • All important progress made by the human race has its roots in daydreaming.

  • Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ...

    • Doris Lessing,
    • title essay (1957), in Paul Schlueter, ed., A Small Personal Voice ()
  • Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

  • Civilization is propelling us too quickly into an era where dreams are less important than action, where speed is taking the place of tranquillity.

  • Dreams are messages from your psyche about your psyche.

  • Ideas often last but a day; feelings, dreams almost forever.

  • Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams.

  • I believe that the experience of dreaming is the clearest proof we have that the unconscious exists.

  • Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that don't.

  • Tell me what you dream, and I'll tell you who you are ...

  • My favorite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see in a dream. My second favorite is correspondence.

  • Dreams can be relentless tyrants.

  • The people who dream are very often the people who see, and dreaming and seeing precede doing.

  • To have realized your dream makes you feel lost.

  • ... the surest guide to the meaning of a dream is the feeling and judgment of the dreamer himself, who deep down inside knows its meaning.

  • In forming a bridge between body and mind, dreams may be used as a springboard from which man can leap to new realms of experience lying outside his normal state of consciousness and enlarge his vision not only of himself, but also of the universe in which he lives.

  • ... when I dream / I am always ageless.

  • Dismounted from her dream, she could not find footing again on solid ground. Her realities repelled her.

  • ... a dreamer — you know — it's a mind that looks over the edges of things ...

  • He felt the sense of loss which every dreamer feels when the dream moves up, comes close, and at last is concrete.

  • Our dreams are never realized and as soon as we see them betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by.

  • We are all more than our experiences / And less than our dreams.

  • In dreams you can have the feeling that you've had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it's really nothing that simple. You know that there's a whole underground system that you call 'dreams,' having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar — where you are now, where you've always been.

  • ... fantasizing is one of the earliest languages in the child's mind. We are in touch with our imagination and dreams before we engage with logic and reason.

  • Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

  • I dream, therefore I become.

  • I would have wed a pirate chief, / had I lived long and long ago, / and made my home a ship that rides / wherever winds can blow. / I would have made me daring songs / to fling against the sweeping gale — / gay songs of strange and plundered shores, / with notes like silver hail. / But years have made their jest of me. / Now I can only walk and sing / a song about a broken heart ... / or any foolish thing.

    • Jessica Powers,
    • "Had I Lived Long Ago," The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers ()
  • Dreams grow holy, put in action ...

  • There is no point in trying to remember your dreams ... There is only the unspeakable joy of eavesdropping on your spirit, catching tiny glimpses of its independent life, resting for a moment in its wisdom, puzzling, laughing sometimes, over what it's up to, what it makes of you.

  • During the day, our souls gather their ... impressions of us, how our lives feel. ... Our spirits collect these impressions, keep them together, like wisps of smoke in a bag. Then, when we're asleep, our brains open up these bags of smoke ... and take a look.

  • Hopes are what your waking mind can imagine. Like prayers. Like bridges you can cross to a better place. And however wild these hopes may be, they are still basically thinkable things. But dreams ... dreams are the unthinkable, the unsayable.

  • Dreams are ... illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.

  • My wandering in the wilderness of / the mind has taught me a little wisdom. / I believe my dreams are real / as my life is a dream.

  • ... a dream is actually a night movie designed to tell you a story.

  • Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. / Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.

  • At the armed borders of sleep / my dreams stand waving.

    • Linda Pastan,
    • "At the Armed Borders of Sleep," Aspects of Eve ()
  • Dreams are the only / afterlife we know; / the place where the children / we were / rock in the arms of the children / we have become.

  • ... a star dies in heaven every time you snatch away someone's dream.

  • ... people have a way of laughing at our dreams until we make them come true.

  • It is well to dream ... as long as we live, we shall continue to dream. But it is also important to remember that like babies dreams are conceived but not all dreams are born alive. Some are aborted. Others are stillborn.

  • ... what man can imagine he may one day achieve.

    • Nancy Hale,
    • in Richard Thruelsen and John Kobler, eds., Adventures of the Mind, 2nd series ()
  • The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.

  • When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.

    • Toni Cade Bambara,
    • in Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., Sturdy Black Bridges ()
  • ... dreams are our spiritual illustrated discovery journals.

  • Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

  • our dreams draw blood from old sores.

    • Ntozake Shange,
    • spell # 7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual for technologically stressed third world people
    • ()
  • There are no impossible dreams, just our limited perception of what is possible.

  • We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

  • Please believe that one single positive dream is more important than a thousand negative realities.

  • So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?

  • By nature subjective, ephemeral, and mercurial, dreams defy capture. Try to grab one whole from your sleep, like a fish from water, and it will squirm, flash, and stream through your fingers.

  • In dreams we travel incognito / through border towns that seem familiar. / Did we live here? We don't know.