Dreams

"'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!"

"This is the Dream World. You've been here many times before in your dreams, but this time, you have been called here for a purpose. Several days travel from here is a beautiful princess who has been cruelly imprisoned within a dark and terrifying castle. She is held captive by one of the most vicious beasts of the Dream World. The Guardian who wields the world-destroying power of the Staff of Dreams. Sadly, the princess has no hope of rescue from anyone. Except for you, Tak. And if you should save her from her plight, happiness will be restored to her kingdom and the powers of darkness will be forever diminished. What say you, great and mighty warrior of the Pupanunu people? Will you bring your wits, your strength and your courage to bear on this sacred mission?"

"In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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...."

"Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams."

"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."

"When we're all a mess I guess the only way out is a sweet dream."

"Realities are very often more miraculous than dreams"

"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."

"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."

"Our dreams wafted over the sullen skyline like crazy meteors of flying embers: a glow in the heart all night."

"Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"'I say to my students: We all spend a big chunk of our lives dreaming—we obviously need to do it for some reason.'"

"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."

"All our dreams can come true—if we 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."

"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."

"Nenne dich nicht arm, weil deine Träume nicht in Erfüllung gegangen sind; wirklich arm ist nur der, der nicht geträumt hat."