Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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”

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

A nightmare is only a dream that hits turbulence. – Terri Guillemets

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