Dreams

"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,"

"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."

"Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we did not know."

"“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."

"The king lay down not to sleep, he lay down to dream."

"To the liar it talks in lies, to the truthful it speaks truth. It can make one man happy, it can make another man sing, but it is the closed tablet-basket of the gods. It is the beautiful bedchamber of , it is the counsellor of Inana. The multiplier of mankind, the voice of one not alive."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."

"We are near awakening when we dream that we dream."

"Our life is no dream, but it should and perhaps will become one."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable."

"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."

"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."

"It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer."

"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."

"The republic is a dream Nothing happens unless first a dream."

"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."

"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."

"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...""