Charles Dickens Quotes

I do not envy the headache you will have when you awake. In the meantime, dream of large women.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

From birth to death man is a long sleep, sometimes dreaming with eyes closed, sometimes dreaming with eyes open, but dreaming all the same, all the time.

If he can't sleep, how will he ever dream?

To sleep perchance to dream

Nothing comes to a sleeper but a dream.

In sleep, we leave behind the sensory stimulation of the outside world.

Not all lucid dreams are useful but they all have a sense of wonder about them. If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams, too?

This moment where we think we rest, when the brain is floating, you know, in sleep, is actually a moment where I could be very creative in a very strange, uncontrolled way.

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand.

I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we've made of them...The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey.

Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.

After I went to bed I had a curious fancy as to dreams. In sleep the doors of the mind are shut, and thoughts come jumping in at the windows. They tumble headlong, and therefore are so disorderly and strange. Sometimes they are stout and light on their feet, and then they are rational dreams.

Sleeping we imagine what awake we wish; D ogs dream of bones, and fishermen of fish.

Dreams aren't memories," he says.

The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of the outside world.

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Let fancy still in my sense in Lethe steep; If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.