Quotes about dreams

My worst nightmare was a boring nightmare, the dream of visiting an empty place where nothing happened, with awful slowness. I would awake tired, with a few unremarkable traces that never seemed to do justice to the dull fear I had felt while still asleep: the memory of the low hum of an electric clock, of an aimless albino hound, of a voice incessantly announcing departure times over a public address system; and that summer, my job was a dream of this sort.

As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams.

In this place, whether we call it Bruddersford or Pittford Falls, perfection is not to be found, neither in men nor in the lot they are offered, to say nothing of the tales we tell of them, these hints and guesses, words in the air and gesticulating shadows, these stumbling chronicles of a dream of life.

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.

A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.

If you’ve not dreamed, you’ve never truly slept. Dreams are the place where you can be yourself; do anything, be anything. The mind set free.

“Would you like to talk?”

“When I dream, I am talking.”

“But to yourself.”

“Who knows me better?” He laughed softly.

“And who can deceive you better,” she said a little tartly.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. (p67)

Dreaming is like—it’s like being a slave. Your dreams come out of all the parts of you that you don’t have any control over.

The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd

Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn'd,

Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep,

They told their comrades, and to Sleep return'd.

“I dreamed this,” he said in a helpless voice. “I dreamed this!”

“Well, Mouche,” said Questioner in a chilly, admonitory voice, “I am sure you believe so. It is all very mystic and dreamlike, and though I can be sensitivity to the moods and impressions such places evoke, I try not to give way to them. When dream is most attractive, then is time to be alert and practical, for it is then that we are most in danger.”