And I don’t dream, I don’t live; I dream real life. All ships are dreamed ships if we have the power to dream them. What kills the dreamer is to not live while he dreams; what hurts the man of action is to not dream while he lives. I fused the beauty of dreaming and the reality of life into a single, blissful colour.
— Pessoa
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This idea — the opposition of imagination to reality, which is also of course the opposition of art to politics — is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power… Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be reconstructed.
— Salman Rushdie
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Reality can be dreamed away.
— William Burroughs
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The great Taoist master Chuang Tzu once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering here and there. In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person. He was only a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke and found himself laying there, a person once again. But then he thought to himself, ‘Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?’
She woke up, started drinking and sometime later went to bed having done something embarrassing. That was her life. They said she was spiritually broke; they told her to experiment with optimism. Was that some kind of joke? She replaced them with figures from her dreams and gave them all different names. Then she realised she could do the same with herself. She could recreate herself, change herself for the better.
great bit of writing there, Peter.
“The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.” – The Waking Life
A dream (to call it a dream) in which
I can believe, in face of the object,
A dream no longer a dream, a thing,
Of things as they are, as the blue guitar
After long strumming on certain nights
Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,
But the very senses as they touch
The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,
Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,
Rising upward from a sea of ex.
— Wallace Stevens