They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Quotes About Dreams
The following dreams quotes are used by permission in The Complete Dream Journal by Laynee Gilbert:
No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.
– Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
Openness to my own dreams puts me in touch with the oldest, most human aspects of who I am; it helps me find my place in the community of man.
– Sheldon Kopp, The Hanged Man
A dream not understood is like a letter not opened.
– The Talmud
Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.
– Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image
I want to write. But more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried in my heart.
– Anne Frank
See more about Recalling & Recording Your Dreams…
Enjoying the dream is more important than interpreting it. Therefore, don’t work so hard that it stops being pleasant and exciting.
– Eugene Gendlin, Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams
The whole dreamwork is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theater in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic.
– Carl Jung, Psychological Reflections
Again and again I find that my own inner counselor, my secret dreaming self, is not only wise and helpful but usually amusing as well.
– Sheldon Kopp, The Hanged Man
As a general rule… I have found that when the head and heart agree on any issue, there is a good chance of their being correct, whereas if they disagree you had better start asking questions.
– Ann Faraday, The Dream Game
Every man is his own playwright when he is asleep.
– Calvin Hall, The Meaning of Dreams
In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.
– Henry David Thoreau
Sharing our dreams with others is sharing ourselves and enables us to know each other deeply.
– Dick McLeester, Welcome to the Magic Theater
Each dream is unique, like each sunrise, with different feelings, textures, and colors.
– Fariba Bogzaran, “Painting Dream Images”
Given that the dreaming brain must perform these remarkable contortions – creating a world, living in it, responding to it, and then carefully blocking all the responses in a manner that does not cross the threshold of awareness – it is no wonder that this dreaming brain seems to be more active than the waking brain.
– William Dement, The Sleepwatchers
That we come to this earth to live is untrue: we come but to sleep, to dream.
– Aztec Poem
For a long time now I have trusted my dreaming self as wiser than that waking self whose head is cluttered with reason and practicalities, so busy trying to control things that he sometimes forgets that the heart has reasons that reason does not know. When I dream, I never forget to trust myself.
– Sheldon Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
Sleep offers itself to all: it is an oracle always ready to be our infallible and silent counselor.
– Synesius of Cyrene, Fourth Century
Dreams of one’s own death almost always reflect the fact that we have reached the point of being willing to relinquish our old roles and self-images, and for this reason these are often the most important dreams of all.
– Ann Faraday, The Dream Game
The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind – whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.
– Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
I have long trusted dreams as prophetic visions. I do not mean that they foretell the future, only that they illuminate the present, when my eyes are closed, so that I may see clearly.
– Sheldon Kopp, The Hanged Man
The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.
– Carl Jung, as quoted in C.G. Jung: Psychological Reflections
If there is something hauntingly beautiful or impressive in your dream, just honor it, respect it, recall it, sense it with your body. More will come.
– Eugene Gendlin, Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
– Virginia Woolf
In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude – the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.
– Carl Jung, as quoted in C. G. Jung: Psychological Reflections
In re-creating dreams through paintings the artist becomes a conscious traveler to the world of the unconscious and brings messages from this mystery land. Through painting this mystery can be unveiled.
– Fariba Bogzaran, “Painting Dream Images”
The cardinal rule in all cases… [is] never to impose a meaning on a dream but to allow it to speak for itself.
– Ann Faraday, Dream Power
We may fool ourselves with trumped-up and distorted self-portraits in waking life but sleep is no friend to embellishment and illusion. Dreams are the mirror of the self.
– Calvin Hall, The Meaning of Dreams
Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings? They also are part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day.
– Carl Jung, as quoted in C. G. Jung: Psychological Reflections
Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.
– Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
Most scary dreams bring something good which is not yet in a form the person can use.
– Eugene Gendlin, Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams
We do not feel as if we were producing the dreams, it is rather as if the dreams came to us. They are not subject to our control but obey their own laws.
– Carl Jung, as quoted in C. G. Jung: Psychological Reflections
It is important that we learn to feel comfortable leaving some dreams a mystery. There will be other dreams and there will always be some mystery remaining.
– Dick McLeester, Welcome to the Magic Theater
Dreaming is the opportunity to hold a citizenship in two worlds, equally real but with different logic and limitations.
– William Dement, The Sleepwatchers
If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that, in the old days, God and his angels came to humans in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams.
– Abraham Lincoln
Much of man’s unhappiness is caused, first, by self-ignorance and, second, by self-concealment.
– Ann Faraday, Dream Power
A dream is a personal document, a letter to oneself.
– Calvin Hall, The Meaning of Dreams
You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
– Mark Twain
We do not sleep merely to live, but to learn to live well.
– Synesius of Cyrene, Fourth Century
Dreams provide a kind of wisdom of the heart, an echoing voice of a profound human sensitivity too often lost to us in the reasonable life of days.
– Sheldon Kopp, The Hanged Man
I have always said to my pupils: “Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream.”
– Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
See more about Dream Interpretation…
One night I dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, content with my lot. Suddenly I awoke and I was Chuang-tzu again. Who am I in reality? A butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu or Chuang-tzu imagining he was a butterfly?
– Chuang-tzu, Third Century B.C.
When dreams are remembered, and their reflections-in-depth are understood, a whole new dimension of wisdom and insight is added to life, bringing greater sanity, meaning, and humor into our existence.
– Ann Faraday, The Dream Game
In the first place dreams reveal what we really think of ourselves when the mask of waking life is removed.
– Calvin Hall, The Meaning of Dreams
Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
– Albert Einstein