What happens when we dream? Is it just our meandering consciousness, or is there some greater purpose to our nightly trips into the metaverse?
Some psychologists believe that dreams may hold the key to understanding our mental health, while others claim that dreaming helps us process and learn from our daily experiences.
If our dreams are telling us things about our reality, and give us clues about what we need to do to achieve our goals? According to recent research, this may be the case. Dreams can offer insights into our daily lives, and can help us understand ourselves better. So next time you have a dream, don’t dismiss it as such. Pay attention to what it might be trying to tell you. Who knows, it could make all the difference in the world.
So keep an open mind – and maybe pack a journal (or a suitcase) – because you never know what might happen on your next dream vacation.
Let’s dive right in and read some famous quotes about dreams and reality.
Quotes About Dreams and Reality
In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.
Carl Jung
Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren’t up to the job.
Alex Garland
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Sigmund Freud
Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
Goethe
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.
Frederic Henry Hedge
In dreams begin responsibilities.
William Butler Yeats
For often, when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.
Aristotle
Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.
Henri Amiel
If one advances confidently in the direction of one’s dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?
Havelock Ellis
All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.
Plutarch
They say dreams are the windows of the soul–take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.
Henry Bromel
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Henry David Thoreau
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allen Poe
It may be that those who do most, dream most.
Stephen Leacock
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 on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
Edward Lawrence
A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
John Barrymore
Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.
William Wordsworth
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac
I don’t dream at night, I dream all day; I dream for a living.
Steven Spielberg
I sleep among ravishing illusions and wake to their burden.
Virginia Woolf
A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
Erich Fromm
The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.
Ashleigh Brilliant
Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.
Gail Godwin
They say dreams are the windows of the soul—take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.
Henry Bromel
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau
All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.
Edgar Cayce
Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
Goethe
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Sigmund Freud
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Victor Hugo
All men of action are dreamers.
James Huneker
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Aldous Huxley
The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.
Swami Vivekanada
The center of every man’s existence is a dream.
G.K. Chesterton
The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between asleep and awake, when you don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.
James Baldwin
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.”
Theodor Adorno
All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
Elias Canetti
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
Pause now to ask yourself the following question: ‘Am I dreaming or awake, right now?’ Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer.
Stephen LaBerge
Dreams are more real than reality itself, they’re closer to the self.
Gao Xingjian
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Anais Nin
Without a dream you’ll not get anywhere.
Kofi Annan
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
A Final Word
Dreams are a mysterious and fascinating part of our lives. Even though we still don’t understand them completely, they can offer us insights into our subconscious thoughts and feelings.
May the quotes on dreams and reality from famous authors, philosophers and thinkers in this blog post serve you well, and provide a glimpse into the complex yet interesting underbelly of our minds.
What’s your favorite dreams quote? Have any others you’d add to the collection? Feel free to drop a comment below.
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