Dreams Quotes

Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.  ~H.F. Hedge


Dreams are answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask.  ~X-Files


All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.  ~Elias Canetti


Dreams are only thoughts you didn't have time to think about during the day.  ~Author Unknown


A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.  ~The Talmud


Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.  ~Marsha Norman


A dream has power to poison sleep.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mutability"


Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.  ~William Dement


Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions.  ~Edgar Cayce


I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.  ~Rene Descartes, "Meditations on First Philosophy"


Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.  ~Henri Amiel


There's a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams.  ~Stoddard King, Jr.


Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.  ~E.M. Cioran, The Tempation to Exist


Pay attention to your dreams - God's angels often speak directly to our hearts when we are asleep.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994


One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.  ~Evelyn Waugh


Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.  ~Gail Godwin


That which the dream shows is the shadow of such wisdom as exists in man, even if during his waking state he may know nothing about it.... We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.  ~Paracelsus, quoted in The Dream Game


Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.  ~Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence


Recall the old story of the rather refined young man who preferred sex dreams to visiting brothels because he met a much nicer type of girl that way.  ~Vivian Mercer


I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long.  If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes




[B]y far the larger number of the dreams... occurred towards dawn; sometimes even, after sunrise, during a "second sleep." A condition of fasting, united, possibly, with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state, seems therefore to be that most open to impressions of the kind. ~Dr. Anna Bonus Kingsford, 1886, preface to Dreams and Dream-Stories, 1888


For dhrames always go by conthraries, my dear.  ~Samuel Lover, Rory O' More


Fantastic dreams amuse my brain,
And waft my spirit home again:
Though captive all day long, 'tis true,
At night I am as free as you...
~James Montgomery (1771–1854), "The Pleasures of Imprisonment: In Two Epistles to a Friend"


Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves.  The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: You must live truthfully.  Right now.  And always.  Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become.  ~Marc Ian Barasch


I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, "Inspiration"


In a dream you are never eighty.  ~Anne Sexton


In dreams, we enter a world that's entirely our own.  ~Steven Kloves, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (movie)


I'll take the dream I had last night,
And put it in my freezer,
So someday long and far away,
When I'm an old grey greezer,
I'll take it out and thaw it out,
This lovely dream I've frozen,
And boil it up and sit me down
And dip my old cold toes in.
~Shel Silverstein, "Frozen Dream," A Light in the Attic


Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius Tyaneus represents the latter as informing King Phraotes that "the Oneiropolists, or Interpreters of Visions, are wont never to interpret any vision till they have first enquired the time at which it befell; for, if it were early, and of the morning sleep, they then thought that they might make a good interpretation thereof... in that the soul was then fitted for divination, and disincumbered. But if in the first sleep, or near midnight, while the soul was as yet clouded and drowned in libations, they, being wise, refused to give any interpretation. ~Dr. Anna Bonus Kingsford, 1886, preface to Dreams and Dream-Stories, 1888


Dreams are road signs along the nighttime highway of sleep. ~Terri Guillemets


It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about.  We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.  ~Louis de Bernières


I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory. ~Andre Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism," 1924


[O]ne can dream so much better in a room where there are pretty things. ~Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables


Dreams digest the meals that are our days. ~Terri Guillemets


A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul. ~Erich Fromm  (Thanks, Sarah)


Some colors exist in dreams that are not present in the waking spectrum. ~Terri Guillemets


What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosing your eyes so suddenly, you seem to have surprised the personages of your dream in full convocation round your bed, and catch one broad glance at them before they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of illusions, whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery, with a perception of their strangeness, such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Haunted Mind," 1835


The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary. ~Ashleigh Brilliant


Codi:  "So you think we all just have animal dreams.  We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives."
Loyd:  "Only if you have an ordinary life.  If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


Dreams are free therapy. Consult your inner Freud. ~Terri Guillemets


Dreams are free therapy, but you can only get appointments at night. ~Terri Guillemets


We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake. ~Erich Fromm


A little poison now and then—maketh pleasant dreams. ~Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by M.A. Mügge, 1908


For a dreamer, night's the only time of day. ~Bob Tzudiker & Noni White, Newsies, 1992 (Jack Kelly)


Those who have compared our life to a dream were right.... We sleeping wake, and waking sleep. ~Michel de Montaigne