50 Dream Quotes

Here are 50 dream quotes to help define and dismantle the curious world of dreams and their unconscious meaning.

1. Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives. ~William Dement
2. All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream. ~Edgar Allan Poe
3. 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 Arthur Baldwin
4. 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
5. Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. ~Inception
6. Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion. ~Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
7. Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. ~Sigmund Freud
8. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. ~Virginia Woolf
9. 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
10. All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. ~Elias Canetti
11. Dreams are only thoughts you didn't have time to think about during the day. ~Author Unknown
12. For often, when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream. ~Aristotle
13. Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self. ~ Gao Xingjian
14. The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. ~Sigmund Freud
15. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. ~William Shakespeare
16. Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams? ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
17. 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
18. A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read. ~The Talmud
19. Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you. ~Marsha Norman
20. Dreams are real while they last -- can we say more of life? ~Havelock Ellis
21. Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions. ~Edgar Cayce
22. I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake. ~Rene Descartes
23. Your world is not real! ~Inception
24. 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
25. Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
26. Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. ~Henri Amiel
27. There's a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams. ~Stoddard King, Jr.
28. One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric. ~Evelyn Waugh
29. Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking. ~Clifton Fadiman
30. Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death. ~Author unknown
31. Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language. ~Gail Godwin
32. A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow. ~Charlotte Brontë
33. 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
34. 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
35. I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night. ~Bill Watterson
36. Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves. The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: You must live truthfully. Right now. And always. Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become. ~Marc Ian Barasch
37. In a dream you are never eighty. ~Anne Sexton
38. In dreams, we enter a world that's entirely our own. ~Steven Kloves
39. I'll take the dream I had last night, And put it in my freezer, So someday long and far away, When I'm an old grey greezer, I'll take it out and thaw it out, This lovely dream I've frozen, And boil it up and sit me down And dip my old cold toes in. ~Shel Silverstein
40. 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
41. A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul. ~Erich Fromm
42. Some colors exist in dreams that are not present in the waking spectrum. ~Terri Guillemets
43. The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary. ~Ashleigh Brilliant
44. Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay, And could not win thee, Sleep, by any stealth: So do not let me wear to-night away. Without thee what is all the morning's wealth? Come, blessed barrier between day and day, Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health! ~William Wordsworth
45. We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more inteligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake. ~Erich Fromm
46. For a dreamer, night's the only time of day. ~Newsies
47. Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast. ~William Shakespeare
48. Those who have compared our life to a dream were right.... We sleeping wake, and waking sleep. ~Michel de Montaigne
49. The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the lucid dreamer control the dream. Like a sailor, lucid dreamers manipulate or direct themselves in the larger expanse of dreaming; however, they do not control it. Lucid dreaming appears to be a co-created experience. ~Robert Waggoner
50. 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