Dream world

“ The atmosphere of dream came round me, but a dream of something just hovering outside the world I knew⁠—a dream wrought in gold and silver, with shining eyes, with graceful beckoning hands, and with voices that rang like bells of music⁠ ⁠... And the pools of light grew larger, merging one into another, until a delicate soft light shone equably throughout the entire forest. ”

“ Will I live again in a land of dreams--a shadow of a dream myself that will still remember the days when I lived in the warm world, the quick juices of hunger in my mouth, in the chest of the body of me the love of woman? ”

“ But dream-life is only a paraphrase, so to speak, of waking life—a phase largely corresponding to the waking life of children [103] and animals; and in waking life the same thing happens. A wish or desire appears in the background of the mind; it moves forward and becomes a definite thought and a plan; then it moves forward again and becomes an action; the action creates a result; and the desire finally establishes itself or its image in the actual world. These emotions and desires and the images which sprung from them have a certain vitality and growth-power of their own. ”

“ Think not the terrors of this night are the delusion of a dream or the snare of a vision! Thou art awake,—not sleeping,—thou art flesh as well as spirit! This place is neither hell nor heaven nor any space between,—it is a corner of thine own world on which thou livest. ”

“ While I watch, the dream comes, more and [102] more often, of a Paradise to be established upon the mountains when at last the wind shall blow sweet over a world that knows not the taint of life any more than of death. ”

“ Lying in my bed, with my weak strength, and figured out with a clear mind and a clear conscience, man going through his life in this foolish world; so I have decided, with my full reason, that the entire world is a dream. ”

“ Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. ”

“ Each one dreams the dream of life in his own way. I have dreamed it in my library; and when the hour shall come in which I must leave this world, may it please God to take me from my ladder—from before my shelves of books!... ”

“ “Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!” ”

“ In my dream, in my last morning-dream, I stood to-day on a promontory— beyond the world; I held a pair of scales, and WEIGHED the world.
Alas, that the rosy dawn came too early to me: she glowed me awake, the jealous one! Jealous is she always of the glows of my morning-dream. ”

“ The ancient seers made earth world, mid-world and heaven world synonyms for three states of consciousness, waking, dreaming and deep sleep. But the dream state of the soul moving in the mid-world of which they spoke is an intellectual state, and its character is not easily to be guessed from that chaos of fancies we ordinarily remember and call our dreams ”

“ A notion of what I mean may be had by comparing the other and higher with certain phases of the true dream-life. The scenes of action of either are totally removed from both time and space, and yet the events of each are actual experiences of the soul; for even in dream-life we suffer and enjoy quite as keenly as in the wakeful world of grosser sense. A woman who sleeps and dreams, finds herself in two widely-different states within the four-and-twenty hours. ”

“ Dream, dream, let me dream,
Wherefore should I waken,
Sleep is as a fairy land
Not yet by spells forsaken.
Break not on the gentle charm
In which night has bound me,
Wherefore, wherefore should I wake
To the cold world around me? ”

“ I am, dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope— those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love,—for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream; ”

“ He has outsoared the shadow of our night. As human life was in the last stanza represented as a dream, so the state of existence in which it is enacted is here figured as night.
1. 5. From the contagion of the world's slow stain. ”

“ If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about ... ”

“ Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? ”

“ And if in our sleep and dreams we perceive, more distinctly than in the day life, signs of the highest beauty and the purest bliss, - should we not then give them our closest attention?
And this I would now point out to you, dear reader, as the first new idea, strange - till now - to the present world, the first thought-child pulsing with life and future promise, born of the profound union of my experience and contemplation:
The solution of the secret of our lives lies in our dreams. ”

“ And burn in fiery dreams each thought till thrice refined
It may have power to mirror the mighty Master's mind.
My spirit would have beauty to draw thee nigh, my bird.
I seek the lips that spake thee, sung thee, a starry word.
I'd breathe anew that music, and lure thee from afar,
And still thy quivering pinions at peace in thy own star.
THE VISION OF LOVE
The twilight fleeted away in pearl on the stream,
And night, like a diamond dome, stood still in our dream.
Your eyes like burnished stones or as stars were bright
With the sudden vision that made us one with the night. ”

“ Hellas
THE world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star;
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. ”

“ If we brood over the alternative that the dream was self-begotten fantasy, no less must we make obeisance to the dreamer of dreams. Who is this who flashes on the inner eye landscapes as living as those we see in nature? The winds blow cool upon the body in dream: the dew is on the grass: the clouds fleet over the sky: we float in air and see all things from an angle of vision of which on waking we have no experience: we move in unknown cities and hurry on secret missions. ”

“ The people's dreams are wandering afield; they pass the seas and mountains of faery, threading the intricate passes led by their souls; they come to golden temples a-ring with a thousand bells; they pass up steep streets lit by paper lanterns, where the doors are green and small; they know their way to witches' chambers and castles of enchantment; they know the spell that brings them to the causeway along the ivory mountains--on one side looking downward they behold the fields of their youth and on the other lie the radiant plains of the future. Arise and write down what the people dream. ”

“ Children yet, the tale to hear, Eager eye and willing ear, Lovingly shall nestle near. In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream— Lingering in the golden gleam— Life, what is it but a dream? ”

“ And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow— You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. ”

“ But at least our dreams are true—to us.'... 'We make the heaven we hope indeed our home! All to the good if we wake up in it after all! If not, the dream will have had its own use here. Why should we fight so with our ignorance? The point is, as to the quality of our dreams! ”

“ The loveliness that is the secret shape
Of once-seen, sweet and oft-dreamed loveliness,
The brain that builds shape, memory, dream and all ...
A white moon stares Time's thinning fabric through,
And makes substantial insubstantial seem,
And shapes immortal mortal as a dream;
And eye and brain flicker as shadows do
Restlessly dancing on a cloudy wall. ”

“ At the sight she felt herself swooning—it was a dream, she thought, a dream that must suddenly change, and yet it was burning itself into her heart and brain with a reality which no dream can possess. ”

“ Most pleasant is it to dream, and to know we dream! By sweet volition we keep ourselves half asleep and half awake; and all our visions of thought, as they go swimming along, partake at once of reality and imagination. Fiction and truth—clouds, shadows, phantoms and phantasms—ether, sunshine, substantial forms and sounds that have a being, blending together in a scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! ”

“ Or, as indeed it seems, that some wild dream
Had wrapp'd me in its horrid tangled maze.
It is a dream,—it must be,—o'er my brain
Such strange bewildering seenes in memory crowd,
As are not, cannot be reality ”

“ Where our bodiless souls are the clustering stars that whirl and revolve and leap
Round the orb of a nameless light in an endless stream.
Oh beauty! the colour of vision is yours and you spring from the seeds of dream. ”

“ See the dreams come flying,
Circle where your body lies,
Like a south wind sighing.
Dream, and dream, and sweetly sleep,
Dreams are free from sinning:
Dream, Ah! better dream than weep,
Dream of better winning. ”

“ O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, Where souls brimful of love abide and meet; Where thirsting longing eyes Watch the slow door That opening, letting in, lets out no more. Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live My very life again though cold in death: Come back to me in dreams, that I may give Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago! ”

“ Now the question of the philosopher has always been: which is the true dream, the sleeping dream or the waking dream? The fact that the one is continuous of itself while the other is not, and that we always fall into a new dream but always wake to the same reality, has given a permanent value to the waking or external life, and an equally fictitious one to the interior or dreaming life. ”

“ Like something fashioned in a dream;
Such Forms as from their covert peep
When earthly cares are laid asleep!
Yet, dream and vision as thou art,
I bless thee with a human heart:
God shield thee to thy latest years! ”

“ In waking dreams we pass the day,
And dreams the hours of darkness sway,
(Day-dreams or night-dreams—who can guess
Whether their truth is more or less?)
Perchance even Death is but a dream,
And fleshless skulls with visions teem.
The Gods we pray to and adore
Are shadows of our dreams—no more ”

“ From trophies of mart and stage, I would fly to the woods' low rustle
And the meadows' kindly page. Let me dream as of old by the river,
And be loved by the dream away; For the dreamer lives for ever,
And a toiler dies in a day. ”

“ From his heart, its native soil, springs up the lovely flower of wisdom; and if others, while waking, dream, and are pained with fantastic delusions from their every sense, he passes the dream of life like one awake ”

“ But there must be intensity. Are you thrilled? Do you stretch out your arms and dream the beauty? It is only when you gaze into a reality empty of the voices of life that I would wake you to bid you dream better. ”

“ III. Light in the Dream You who have spent your life in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. For you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. Your goal was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. And you sought a blackness so complete that you could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. ”

“ But when at last we penetrate into its real meaning we find ourselves at a bound in the very heart of the dreamer’s secrets, and find to our astonishment that an apparently senseless dream is quite full of sense, and deals with extraordinarily important and serious problems of the soul. ”

“ We do not claim that this book will prove an interpreter of all dreams, or that the keys disclosed will open to you all the mysteries of the future, or even all those surrounding your own personality, but by studying the definitions and the plane upon which they were written, you will be able, through the power of your own spirit, to interpret your own dreams. The combination of dream and dream influences are as infinite as the stars, or the combination of thought and number. ”

“ In this way the Paradise of dreams has been a reservoir from which men have always drawn consolation and sweet memory and hope, even belief, the imagination and gratification of desires that the world restrained, the promise and proof of the dearest and deepest aspirations. ”