Awake, we see a dying world; asleep, dreams.
—Heraclitus, translated by Guy Davenport

The machinery of dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing.
—Thomas De Quincey, “Dreaming”

My cat woke me up because he was playing Scrabble against himself and needed me to look up a word.
(May 24, 2012)

Though we might dream of places impossibly exotic, dreaming is always a process of looking inwards.
—Darren Anderson, Imaginary Cities

I visited the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace Island and Cave. Which is a museum in Chicago. And is accessed via a ferry. I missed the ferry and had to wait an hour.

Later: I was chopping celery.
(December 16, 2021)

The beginnings, the endings: they are from separate dreams. They form separate dreams.
—Jenny Boully, from [one love affair]*

It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear.
—H. P. Lovecraft, letter

Even nightmares can show mercy.
—D. J. Enright, Injury Time

I spotted Alfred Hitchcock on my street, and then realized, with fear, that I was in a Hitchcock movie.
(May 23, 2012)

No one is ever spared except in dreams.
—W. H. Auden, from “Herman Melville”

I was writing Lord Byron’s letters. He was living his rackety life; I was recording and defending it in the high style.
(April 16, 2009)

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
—Lord Byron, “Darkness”

’Tis certain, that several had monitory dreams of the conflagration of London.
—John Aubrey, Miscellanies

Our dreams should warn us of ourselves.
—Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Salutation

Ivan Goncharov somehow managed to reach out to me from beyond the grave because he needed to tell me something important about procrastination. He did not succeed in conveying the details of his message.
(June 30, 2026)

To the novelist, the characters in his novel are known as those in a dream are known, the texture too complicated to be explained.
—Anthony Powell, Infants of the Spring

I met a guy whose first name was Van Halen.
(June 7, 2019)

Some poems are closer to letters and others to dreams.
—Adrienne Rich, letter to Robert Lowell, March 21, 1971

I read a note Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in the 1960s declining a request that she write an article explaining the Beatles to the old.
(June 1, 2015)

Dreams are fifty years behind the times, like opera, and in need of the same overhaul.
—Peter De Vries, Without a Stitch in Time

I lunched with all four Beatles. No one noticed. “Don’t Let Me Down” came on, and Paul gestured to me to stay cool, not give it away.
(June 13, 2014)

I rarely transgress in a dream; I dream of the guilt that follows transgression.
—Elisa Gabbert, The Self Unstable

“Cinderella with a husky voice.”
“Where have we met?”
“In another guy’s dream.”
—Steve Fischer and Oliver H. P. Garrett, screenplay for Dead Reckoning

Dreams can be exchanged between sleepers in the Arabian Nights, so that one dreamer can enter another’s dream.
—Marina Warner, Stranger Magic

It was not a summer when you wanted to appear in your neighbors’ dreams.
—Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692

My son didn’t dream of the werewolf.
—John Cheever, journal, 1959

I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only two or three times a year.
—H. P. Lovecraft, letter

Nonexistent Cubs pitcher Jason Chilcotte went on the injured list because his girlfriend ate his pitching hand.
(July 8, 2016)

This was a dream, a bad one, and it seemed to him that the essence of bad dreams was lack of control.
—Stephen King, The Dark Half

My parents had a device in their car that would let them smell the house we all lived in when I was a kid.
(November 26, 2024)

And the dreams that you have, alone in an empty room, waiting for the door that will open, the thing that is bound to happen.
—Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

In her clearing consciousness the dream remained, like a wall she could take shelter behind.
—Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries

Such a lust anoon me took
To slepe that ryght upon my book
Y fil aslepe, and therwith even
Me mette so ynly swete a sweven,
So wonderful that never yit
Y trowe no man had the wyt
To konne wel my sweven rede.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess

We had a tiny pet giraffe and a tiny pet rhino, both just smaller than cat-size.
(July 11, 2015)

Let us return to Coleridge. He says it doesn’t matter what we dream, that the dream searches for explanations. He gives an example: a lion suddenly appears in this room; and we are all afraid: the fear has been caused by the image of the lion. But in dreams the reverse can occur. We feel oppressed, and then search for an explanation. I, absurdly but vividly, dream that a sphinx has lain down next to me. The sphinx is not the cause of my fear, it is an explanation of my feeling of oppression. Coleridge adds that people who have been frightened by imaginary ghosts have gone mad. On the other hand, a person who dreams a ghost can wake up, and within a few seconds, regain his composure.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

Borges died at twenty-one. His oeuvre was the same, but felt totally different, fierce talent burned out young.
(August 19, 2013)

In some ways a narrative is like a dream. You don’t analyze a dream—you just pass through it. . . . A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away.
—Haruki Murakami, lecture

Why is it that no consciously invented stories ever point beyond themselves as multifariously as dreams?
—Elif Batuman, The Possessed

I read an unpublished story by Vladimir Nabokov, “H. H. in Eden.” In it, Humbert Humbert, having somehow escaped the fate detailed for him in the introduction to Lolita, tricks the Archangel Michael into letting him into Heaven, only to discover that it’s full of other Humberts. Too late, Humbert realizes it’s he who was tricked: This is purgatory.
(July 27, 2008)

Non-fiction always tends to become fiction; only the dream compels honesty.
—Rebecca West, “Unhappily Ever After”

The reader looks in vain for any immediate reason why Alice should have dreamt such a dream.
—The Illustrated Times, from a review of the newly published Alice in Wonderland

Cats had ISBNs.
(February 1, 2018)

Cats, who sleep more than any other animals, must lead the large part of their lives in dreams.
—Guy Davenport, letter to James Laughlin

No matter how desolating the dream, the next day perhaps you feel cleansed, paradoxically at peace.
—D. J. Enright, Interplay

I was part of Parker’s string for a heist. We were all staying in a motel under assumed names, waiting for the moment. The first dangerous complication came when I went to the bookstore next door to kill time and an old colleague recognized me.
(May 13, 2022)

The moment when a dream ceases to be a neutral experience and declares itself a nightmare.
—Paul Bowles, Without Stopping

“The strangest part of the dream,” said Pelletier, “was that the water was alive.”
—Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Descriptions of works of art, like descriptions of dreams, halt stories and sap their strength.
—Álvaro Enrique, Sudden Death

“Infinite Jest” was actually a video game, and by playing it long enough and well enough I had been awarded a secret code that would unlock a whole slate of new characters. I entered the code, and as a list of dozens of names began scrolling down the screen, I shivered in awe, which woke me.
(September 10, 2008)

I am drawing patterns so fast that last night I dreamed I had to draw a sausage; somehow I had to eat it first.
—William Morris, letter

The Atlantes, according to my sources, never eat any living thing, and never dream, either.
—Herodotus, The Histories

All that’s left to me now I find in my dreams
For fate in my fortune’s left nothing the same.
—John Clare, from “The Round Oak”

Love has in it something of the dream and something of movement.
—Paul Valéry, Analects

The human heart is full of leaks;
The human head is full of vapors.
—Edmund Wilson, part of a poem he dreamed

I changed all my passwords to RSTLNE.
(September 29, 2013)

There is a drowsy, heavy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes . . . than you would in five nights.
—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

At night we dream of reckless soaring;
Our hollow bones still ring with wind.
—Campbell McGrath, “Spring Comes to Chicago”

I was working at Waldenbooks with a colleague from my current job who had also been a bookseller in his past. No customers in sight. He was standing on the counter holding a pizza, carefully dropping it slice by slice to the floor, trying to make it land in a pizza shape.
(March 21, 2018)

My dreams are not calm.
—Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Dreams are the Sea-Monkeys of consciousness.
—Michael Chabon, New York Review of Books

I was a bookseller again at Books, Etc. in Bayswater, London. A man wearing a tuxedo stepped to the counter and sang, in operatic tones,
“All I want
Is a major prize,
Some large
Financial reward.”
All of us clerks applauded, and he nodded and left.
(September 18, 2018)

The art of dreaming is difficult, because it’s an art of passivity, in which we concentrate our efforts on avoiding all effort.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Habitually to dream magnificently, a man must have a constitutional determination to reverie.
—Thomas De Quincey, “Suspiria de Profundis”

The dream of my Brother I shall remember.
—Samuel Johnson, diary, January 23, 1759

[Samuel] Johnson came fretfully back from seeing Hester [Thrale]’s son to school, suddenly immersed in memories of his own adolescence. “Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption that entered my heart was communicated in a dream.” “What was it, Sir?” said I. “Do not ask me,” replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.
—Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

My earliest memory is of a dream.
—Anne Carson, “Every Entrance Is an Exit (A Praise of Sleep)”

I was part of Parker’s string for a heist. Preparing for the heist required us, for some unexplained reason, to create a fake literary magazine. When the heist went sour, I sat in what should have been the getaway car and read an Anne Carson interview from our magazine.
(November 26, 2007)

Coming to, coming round. Slowly. Holding onto sleep, then hovering in hypnoland for as long as you can. Jung almost redeems himself from creepy spiritus munditude with the story in which he asks his new patient, a pathologically anxious, blocked writer, to describe his day in detail. “Well, I wake, get up and . . .” “Stop,” Jung says. “That’s where you’re going wrong.”
—Jenny Diski, London Review of Books

When I awaken, all the dreams are gathered about me, but I am careful not to reflect on them.
—Kafka, diary

A dream in which his psychoanalyst is congratulating him on how good his dreams are.
—Helen Macdonald, reading T. H. White’s dreambook

I read a headline: “A small town denounces a local baby—find out why!”
(May 21, 2022)

There is no man put to any torment, but quaketh and trembleth a great while after the executioner hath withdrawn his hand from him. In the daye time wee torment our thoughts and imaginations with sundry cares and devices; all the night time they quake and tremble after the terror of their late suffering, and still continue thinking of the perplexities they have endured.
—Thomas Nash, Terrors of the Night

At this time Shelley was ever in a dreamy state, and he told me he was in the habit of noting down his dreams. The first day he said, they amounted to a page, the next to two, the third to several, till at last they constituted the greater part of his existence.
—Tom Medwin, cousin of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Dreams have been too often my surrogate for experience.
—Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel.
—Marcel Proust on dreams, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

I read a profile of former Met Howard Johnson and learned that his hobby, both during his playing career and now, is helping police solve cold cases.
(February 23, 2017)

I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. . . . The poverty of my dreams mortifies me.
—Charles Lamb, “Witches, and Other Night-Fears”

At night dreaming suggestive dreams of telegraph-blanks & telephone-booths & corner letter-drops, all respectable or accepted means of interborough communication.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, letter

I swam across Lake Michigan carrying a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled.”
(July 10, 2008)

The potent combination of urgency and enigma [in dreams] gives you the impression that there is something you need to know.
—Tim Parks, New York Review of Books blog

Marcel Proust and Eloise of the Plaza were at my nephew’s birthday party. I got the sense that they’d been invited in error, that it was possible that they knew no one at the party aside from each other. That wasn’t a problem, however, as they gave the impression of being the sort of close friends who need little to no outside contact. Huddled together in a corner, they sipped from the tiny teacups of my niece’s tea set and quietly shared private, gossipy jokes that caused them now and again to break out in skeins of poorly muffled giggles.
(December 10, 2007)

On a good 19 per cent of these pages she is asleep.
—Anne Carson, on Proust's Albertine

The parts I tell you are often not the most important parts of the dream.
—Jackie Wang, from “Without Tongue”

A closing note, as Halloween nears: When you see a spiderweb but no spider, that’s because the spider is waiting for you in your dreams.