Dreams

"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."

"Like glimpses of forgotten dreams."

"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."

"Across the silent stream Where the dream-shadows go, From the dim blue Hill of Dream I have heard the west wind blow."

"There is some ill a-brewing towards my rest, For I did dream of money-bags to-night."

"Thou hast beat me out Twelve several times, and I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me."

"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."

"As a dream when one awaketh."

"That holy dream—that holy dream, While all the world were chiding, Hath cheered me as a lovely beam A lonely spirit guiding."

"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."

"They say sleep is the cousin of death, so my eye's wide open: Because a dream is kin to your last breath."

"Did I dream this belief Or did I believe this dream? Now I will find relief I grieve"

"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."

"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"."

"The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows."

"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?"

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

"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."

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

"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."

"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 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"."

"Dream after dream ensues; And still they dream that they shall still succeed; And still are disappointed."

"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...."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pour accomplir de grandes choses il ne suffit pas d'agir il faut rêver; il ne suffit pas de calculer, il faut croire."

"People say that your dreams are the only things that save ya... Come on baby in our dreams, we can live our misbehaviors"

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Yes, you can kill the dreamer. Absolutely, you can kill the dreamer. But you cannot kill the dream."

"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.”"