Quotes about dreams

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Happy endings were for children’s stories and fool. You live in misery, and then you die. Life, by definition, was not designed to end happily.

Louis continued aft. No happy ending, then. That was a fact, certain as death itself. He was living at the moment in a dream, an imagined world where everything went right.

But—dreams are real while they last. Could you say more of life?

A dream sequence was no more than a happy interlude, but maybe a happy interlude could last for an awful long time.

If we dreamt the same thing every night, it would affect us as much as the objects we see every day. And if the artisan were sure to dream every night for twelve hours' duration that he was king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king, who should dream every night that he was an artisan.

Life is a dream a little less inconstant.

“Maester Luwin says there’s nothing in dreams that a man need fear.”

“There is,” said Jojen.

“What?”

“The past. The future. The truth.”

One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite.

“In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”

“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.”

I could not find my way back in dreams, I knew then. They were memory and desire, terror and hope; they told me only what I already knew.

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,

Some frequently, some seldom, some by night

And some by day.

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.