Thoughts and reflections on dreams, an article with various opinions and meditations about dreams and dreamers by famous authors, writers, artists or philophers.
Reflections and thoughts on the dream. According to the Qabbalah, God in his most intimate and hidden essence is referred to as “The Infinite” (En Soft), of which nothing can be scrutinized or said; therefore he is also referred to as the “Nothing” (Ajin) or with more metaphorical expressions, such as the “Long Face”, “The Holy Old Man” and others. The Zohar or Sefer Zohar (Book of Splendor) is the most relevant work for speculative depth, the one that constitutes the fulcrum and the culmination of medieval qabbalah.
For the mystics of the kabbalah the universe is woven with symbols that gradually lead to the real being, which is no longer a sign, but the ultimate earth marker, the “Great thing signified”: in this horizon, the Zohar teaches, there is no gap between the artificial sign and the thing signified, because the one and the other are at the same time reality and dream, exteriority and interiority, sensitivity and abstraction, life and death. It is the principle of Ficino’s “coincidentia oppositorum” that reminds us of Nietzsche’s blurred boundary between good and evil, or the union between ethics and aesthetics of Ayer and Wittgenstein; in practice it is the swampy and contradictory terrain of language and of our stupid humanity as the mystic Carl William Brown maintains.
Oneiromancy or dream interpretation is an ancient art that has had its followers throughout history. Thus, all the greatest literary geniuses have experimented with dreams, art and fantasy, starting with Socrates and Plato who, thanks to their Daimon, a protective genius, received precious advice in dreams. Thanks to dreams and premonitions, all the great poets have fueled the desires and fantasy of humanity, thus becoming seers and illuminating the path to happiness. Dreams, sleep and death, themes that have always been at the centre of artistic reflection, were exalted in the nineteenth century, creating the myth of the romantic and later decadent hero.
The eternal theme of love and death thus resulted in the famous Freudian life and death instincts, giving life to a new discipline, which, inspired both by great poets of the past such as William Shakespeare and by the method of association of ideas, would bring fundamental innovations to the cultural and scientific world of the twentieth century. Thus, by taking up the complex symbolism of language, myths, folklore, and fairy tales, the scholars of the discipline earned worldwide fame, while at the same time giving back immense value to the fantastic, literary, poetic, and artistic creation in general, so much so that Freud himself eventually argued that the ideal psychoanalyst should be, more than a doctor, a humanistic intellectual. This reality has also led, absurdly, to an excessive medicalization of the discipline, now the legacy of mediocre scientists more inclined to stupidity than to human genius.
Carl William Brown
Do not believe that dreams that are not remembered in their entirety can be interpreted, whether the central part or the conclusion has been forgotten; in fact, to offer the exact explanation, it is necessary to investigate the overall development of the dream, but one can only understand what is remembered in its entirety.
Artemidorus of Daldi
Dreams often reveal themselves, without any disguise, as wish-fulfilments; so that one may be surprised that the language of dreams has not been understood long ago. For example, there is a dream which I can produce in myself whenever I want, experimentally, so to speak. If in the evening I eat sardines, olives or any other very salty food, during the night I become thirsty and wake up. But my awakening is preceded by a dream which always has the same content, namely that I am drinking. I dream that I am already drinking in large gulps of water, which has that delicious taste of cold drinks for those who are burning with thirst.
Sigmund Freud
Some critics say that aphoristic literature is not very attractive because it does not help to escape, much less to dream, but on the contrary it is a lucid observation of reality, it is a comparison-reflection with ourselves and with the world around us. But isn’t this perhaps the greatest dream, that of concretely improving our miserable earthly condition.
Carl William Brown
The scientific study of dreams starts from the assumption that they are the product of our mental activity. Nevertheless, the finished dream strikes us as something alien. We are so little inclined to acknowledge our own responsibility that we just as easily say mir hat getraumt [“I had a dream”] as ich habe getraumt [“I had a dream”].
Sigmund Freud
The perfect clarity of all dream representations, which presupposes unconditional faith in their reality, takes us back to ancient states of humanity, when hallucination was extremely frequent and took over entire communities, entire peoples. Thus, in sleep and in dreams, we once again perform the task of primitive humanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the novel Aurélia by Gérard de Nerval, the fundamental problem which she addresses is that of the status of dream-experiences. It begins with an assertion about dreaming, and continues with a paragraph which questions its status by bringing in, and simultaneously questioning, the notion of illness. The last paragraph of the text modifies this ambivalence, which has been present, albeit evolving, throughout. In sum, although the narrator clearly identifies post hoc the illusory aspects of his experience, he seeks at the same time to retain a sense of the value of this experience and the convictions to which it has led. But there remains a discordance between dreams resulting in illness on the one hand, and dreams as a source of knowledge and insight on the other.
Tony James
Lo scrittore e filosofo greco antico Artemidoro di Daldi, grande maestro nell’arte divinatoria, interprete di sogni e visioni con scopi scientifici e didattici , sosteneva che il sogno è un movimento o un’invenzione multiforme dell’anima, che segnala il bene o il male futuri. Stando così le cose, l’anima predice tutto ciò che accadrà con il passare del tempo, prima o poi, confermando una famosa sentenza più moderna del noto economista inglese John Maynard Keynes, che aveva giustamente previsto che nel lungo periodo saremo tutti morti.
Carl William Brown
Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude and primitive civilization, man believed that he knew a second real world in the dream; this is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the dream, no reason would have been found to split the world. Even the division into soul and body is connected with the most ancient conception of the dream, and so is the admission of a corporeal form of the soul, that is, the origin of all belief in spirits and probably also of belief in gods. “The dead continue to live; for in dreams he appears alive”: so it was concluded then, for many millennia.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The madman is a waking dreamer.” Krauss states that “madness is a dream dreamed while the senses are awake.” Schopenhauer calls dreams a short madness and madness a long dream. Hagen describes delirium as a dream life produced not by sleep but by illness. Wundt writes: “We ourselves, in fact, can experience in dreams almost all those phenomena that occur in madhouses.”
Sigmund Freud
Just as man still reasons in dreams today, so humanity also reasoned in waking life for many millennia: the first cause that presented itself to the mind to explain something that needed explanation was enough for it and was considered truth. (According to the tales of travellers, savages still do this today.) In dreams this very ancient part of humanity continues to act in us, because it is the basis on which the higher reason developed and still develops in every man; dreams take us back to remote stages of human civilization and provide the means to understand them better.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The ancient Greek writer and philosopher Artemidorus of Daldis, a great master in the art of divination, interpreter of dreams and visions for scientific and educational purposes, argued that the dream is a movement or a multiform invention of the soul, which signals future good or evil. This being the case, the soul predicts everything that will happen with the passage of time, sooner or later, confirming a famous more modern sentence of the well-known English economist John Maynard Keynes, who had rightly predicted that in the long run we will all be dead.
Carl William Brown
Dreams of parental death apply most frequently to the parent of the same sex as the dreamer: that is, men dream mostly of the death of their father, women of their mother. I cannot claim that this is universally true, but it is so in the majority of cases, so evidently as to require an explanation based on an element that has general validity. Roughly speaking, it is as if a sexual preference were felt in the early years: as if boys considered their fathers and girls their mothers as rivals in love, whose elimination could not fail to benefit them.
Sigmund Freud
The extraordinary intensity of our impressions in dreams certainly comes from the fact that in dreams we are never distracted. In life we ??always are, and we must be. Just as our field of vision includes not only the observed object, but also what we see all around, gradually fading at the edges, so in our consciousness there is not only the momentary event, but also virtually all our memories, experiences and predictions. In dreams we are aware only of what we are dreaming. Our middle consciousness sleeps. In dreams, it sleeps more deeply than our subconscious. Therefore, in dreams, we are not surprised to fly, in our dream consciousness, in fact, the force of gravity is not contemplated; we are not surprised that the dead reappear, because for those who dream the natural law of becoming and succumbing does not exist. Thus, even tenderness for a loved one in a dream is something more beautiful than in reality, because this tenderness shines like a flame without a flickering halo, because everything we know in waking life, in particular and in general, about love and its inadequacy is suppressed.
Arthur Schnitzler
Life and dreams are pages of the same, identical book. Reading in succession is called real life. But when the normal reading hour (the day) is over and the time for rest has come, we often still leaf through idly, opening the book, without order or connection, now to one page, now to another: sometimes it is a page already read, sometimes a page not yet known, but always of the same book.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The fact that the meanings of dreams are arranged in overlapping layers is one of the most delicate but also the most interesting problems of dream interpretation. Anyone who forgets this possibility will easily go astray and make untenable statements about the nature of dreams.
Sigmund Freud
America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now… we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004, American historian)
All men dream, but unequally. Those that dream at night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake the next day to find that their dreams were just vanity. But those who dream during the day with their eyes wide open are dangerous men; they act out their dreams to make them reality.
Thomas E. Lawrence
You will achieve grand dream, a day at a time, so set goals for each day – not long and difficult projects, but chores that will take you, step by step, toward your rainbow. Write them down, if you must, but limit your list so that you won’t have to drag today’s undone matters into tomorrow. Remember that you cannot build your pyramid in twenty-four hours. Be patient. Never allow your day to become so cluttered that you neglect your most important goal – to do the best you can, enjoy this day, and rest satisfied with what you have accomplished.
Og Mandino (1923-1996, American motivational author, speaker)
Belief in prophetic dreams has many followers, because it can be based on the fact that in the future certain things will actually come to pass, just as the wish, in the dream, had constructed them. But there is little to be surprised about, and between the dream and its fulfillment, as a rule, there are large gaps that the credulity of dreamers likes to overlook.
Sigmund Freud
Even in the best-interpreted dreams it is often necessary to leave a point in the dark, because in the course of the interpretation one notices that at that point a tangle of dream thoughts begins that cannot be unraveled, but which has not contributed anything else to the content of the dream either. This is then the navel of the dream, the point at which it sinks into the unknown.
Sigmund Freud
The separation of affects from the ideational material which has generated them is the most surprising thing that can happen to them during the formation of dreams; but it is neither the only nor the most essential alteration which they undergo on their way from the dream-thoughts to the manifest dream. If we compare the affects of the dream-thoughts with those of the dream, one thing becomes immediately evident. Whenever there is an affect in a dream, it is also to be found in the dream-thoughts. But not vice versa. A dream is generally poorer in affect than the psychic material from whose elaboration it comes. When I have reconstructed the dream-thoughts, I generally find that in them the most intense psychic impulses are struggling to make themselves felt, and usually they are struggling against others which are in sharp contrast to them. If I then return to the dream, it often appears faded and devoid of emotional tone of any notable intensity. The dream-work has reduced not only the content but often also the emotional tone of my thoughts to a level of indifference. One might say that the dream-work brings about a repression of affects.
Sigmund Freud
A dream is a completely asocial psychic product; it has nothing to communicate to anyone else, it arises within the subject as a compromise between the psychic forces struggling within him, it remains unintelligible to the subject himself and is, for this reason, completely uninteresting to others. Not only does it not need to value clarity, but it must actually avoid being understood, for otherwise it would be destroyed; it can exist only in simulated form. Therefore it can freely make use of the mechanism that dominates the mental processes of the unconscious to the limit of a distortion that can no longer be maintained. A joke, on the other hand, is the most social of all psychic functions aiming at a certain pleasure.
Sigmund Freud
Dreams are not intentional and voluntary inventions, but natural phenomena which are precisely what they represent. They do not deceive, do not lie, do not falsify, do not hide anything, but naively state what they are and what they mean. They are irritating and lead us down the wrong path only because we do not understand them. They do not resort to artifices to hide something from us, but they say what forms their content, in the clearest way possible for them. We can also understand the reason why they are so strange and difficult. Experience, in fact, shows us that they always strive to express something that the ego does not know and does not understand.
C.G. Jung
Dreams fall into three categories, depending on their attitude towards wish-fulfilment. The first category consists of those dreams that openly represent an unrepressed wish: these are the infantile type of dreams that are becoming increasingly rare among adults. Secondly, there are dreams that express a repressed wish with a disguise: these undoubtedly constitute the vast majority of our dreams and can only be understood through analysis. Finally, there are dreams that represent a repressed wish, without masking it or with an insufficient mask. These last dreams are always accompanied by anxiety, which interrupts them. In this case, anxiety replaces dream distortion, and in the cases of the second category, anxiety is avoided only through dream work. It is not difficult to demonstrate that the representative content that produces anxiety was once a wish, which was then repressed.
Sigmund Freud
Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.
Lao Tzu
During the dream, the soul, free from the daily commitment of the senses, can wander at will in the body and visit it everywhere, verifying its state of health or illness, and for this rejoicing or saddening: in one case or another it evokes in the dream images of the sky, of stars, of oceans, of dew; or even of horrible monsters, scenes of war, ghosts of the dead, denouncing in this way and with such language the well-disguised illnesses, or the others that, because they are still at the beginning, do not yet possess the necessary vigor to manifest themselves.
Hippocrates of Cos
Perhaps one of the best ways to demystify the nature of dreams is to affirm that there is nothing dreamlike about them. That is, by removing from this term (which derives from ‘òneiros’, a Greek term for dream) any connotation of vagueness, imprecision, mystery, surreality. Dreams, on the other hand, are very often the complete opposite: precise, full of minute and ‘realistic’ details, almost peremptory, and – apparently while the dreamer is asleep – anything but improbable.
G. Dorfles
No human experience is perhaps as spontaneously creative as the dream. No phenomenon is more charged with unpredictably transformative potential. No moment is more whimsically ‘poietic’. The unexpected, the unthinkable, the incongruous, the unnatural are transformed, with the dream, into the most casual obviousness. Being fades into becoming, the subject is transubstantiated into object [
] It can be said, ultimately, that those who dream shamanize, that is, unconsciously create, magically transform: such is the vibrant, provocative nature of the dream experience.
V. Lanternari
Aim for your star, no matter how far, you must reach high above and touch your life with love, you must never look back, but charge on! Attack! See your goal your star of desire, see it red hot, feel it burning, you must be obsessed with it to make it your true yearning, be ready my friends for when you truly believe it, you will certainly achieve it and by all of God’s universal laws you will always receive it!
Bob Smith
I know from experience, to which I have found no exceptions, that every dream deals with the dreamer himself. Dreams are completely egoistic. Whenever my ego does not appear in the content of the dream, but only some stranger is there, I can safely assume that my ego is concealed by identification with this person; I can insert my ego into the context. At other times, when my ego appears in the dream, the circumstance in which it appears can make me understand that there is some other person concealed behind me by identification. In that case the dream should warn me to transfer to myself, during the interpretation, the hidden common element, which refers to that person. There are dreams in which my ego appears together with other people, who, when the identification is resolved, turn out to be my ego again. By means of these identifications I should then be able to bring my ego into contact with certain ideas whose acceptance has been forbidden by the censorship. Thus my ego can be represented in a dream several times, now directly, now by identification with strangers.
Sigmund Freud
Good literature makes us travel everywhere, dreams and fantasy become foresight and memory at the same time, the past becomes present, and the future past, and we through the mythical arcana of thought leave these murky meanders leaving our beloved politicians on this earth to rot with those who trust them.
Carl William Brown
Dreams often seem to have more than one meaning. They, as our examples have shown, include several wish-fulfilments side by side; moreover, one succession of meanings or wish-fulfilments may be superimposed on another, the deepest being the fulfilment of a wish from early childhood. And here one should ask again whether it is not more correct to assert that this happens “always” rather than “often”. Sigmund Freud
Our dreams are as real, while they last, as the occurrences of the daytime. We see, hear, feel, act, experience pleasure and suffer pain as vividly and actually in a dream as when awake. The occurrences and transactions of a year are crowded into the limits of a second, and the dream remembered is as real as the past occurrences of life.
Albert Pike (1809-1891, American lawyer, Masonic author, historian)
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream – a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows – is essentially poetry.
Michel Leiris
You’re in the midst of a war: a battle between the limits of a crowd seeking the surrender of your dreams, and the power of your true vision to create and contribute. It is a fight between those who will tell you what you cannot do, and that part of you that knows – and has always known – that we are more than our environment; and that a dream, backed by an unrelenting will to attain it, is truly a reality with an imminent arrival.
Anthony Robbins
Are you disappointed, discouraged and discontented with your present level of success? Are you secretly dissatisfied with your present status? Do you want to become a better and more beautiful person than you are today? Would you like to be able to really learn how to be proud of yourself and still not lose genuine humility? Then start dreaming! It’s possible! You can become the person you have always wanted to be!
Robert H. Schuller
On the same topic you can read:
Great quotes and aphorisms on dreams
Aforismi e citazioni sui sogni
World Day Dreams September the 25th 2024
