Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience.
 Jack London, The Star Rover (1915). copy citation

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Author Jack London
Source The Star Rover
Topic experience dream
Date 1915
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1162/1162-h/1162-h.htm

Context

“You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.
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