QUOTES ABOUT DREAMS

 

“A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened.” The Talmud

 

“Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?” Carl Jung

 

“When we first approach the unconscious, it is a hard nut for us to crack. We can’t penetrate it, we don’t understand our dreams and so on; we have to bite through to understand dreams and we are repelled until we get into them and find there is a message within, something that nourishes. You often see that in analysis. People who have a heavy depression or some other problem, generally, if they have had other types of analysis before, or never had any analysis, at first are bewildered by our Jungian methods. We say, ‘Any dreams?’ and then we begin to nut-crack dream symbols, and they wonder what that has to do with their marital problem or depression–until they discover for themselves that yes, their dreams have a life-giving message, and then they begin to realize the nourishing aspects of the unconscious. For instance, they leave the analytic hour feeling better; they came into the hour depressed and they haven’t understood much yet, but they feel better, more hopeful. They come in contact with the nourishing aspect of the unconscious, and this begins to give some vitality to consciousness, to impart some hope.” Marie-Louise von Franz, 1999, pp. 105-6

 

“Dreams show us how to find meaning in our lives, how to fulfill our own destiny, how to
realize the greater potential of life within us.” Marie-Louise von Franz

 

“Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.” Carl G. Jung

 

“Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without your understanding their language. One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight.”
Carl G. Jung, Liber Novus, page 233

 

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost recesses of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was any conscious ego.” Carl Jung

 

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”  Virginia Woolf

 

“All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.”  Elias Canetti

 

“Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you.” Marsha Norman

 

“Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.”  Henri Amiel

 

“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

 

“A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul….We are…more intelligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake.”  Erich Fromm

 

“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.” Shakespeare

 

“In dreams begins responsibility.”  William Butler Yeats

 

“Dreams are the most curious asides and soliloquies of the soul….Dreams often surprise us into the strangest self-knowledge…. Dreaming is the truest confessional, and often the sharpest penance.” Alexander Smith (1829–1867), “On Dreams and Dreaming”

 

“The action of the imaginative faculty during sleep is the same as at the time when it receives a prophecy.”  Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed

 

“Now who is such a stranger to human experience as not sometimes to have perceived some truth in dreams?”  Tertullian (priest in Rome during the 3^rd century AD)

 

Translation of words found on a shingle at a door in a temple at Memphis (in ancient Egypt), dated circa 3,000 BCE:  “I interpret dreams, having the gods’ mandate to do so. The interpreter present here is Cretan.”

 

“Your future depends on your dreams. So go to sleep!” Mesut Barazany

 

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