Dreaming Awake Quotes & Sayings

Dreaming awake is sometimes a dangerous thing. In trying to get to heaven you may end up in the hell. — Stevan V. Nikolic

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter? — Rene Descartes

Pages burnt, memories buried, I wake
or think I'm awake. Or dreaming still? — Yong Shu Hoong

Am I awake or dreaming? It doesn't matter anymore. When I close my eyes I dream of death and war. When I open my eyes I see death and war. — Michael Anthony

But I must go on," said the Lady Amalthea, "for it is never finished. Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me know. People look at me as though I should know them, and I do know them in the dream, and always the fire draws me nearer, though I am awake - — Peter S. Beagle

When I wasn't lying awake thinking and planning and fighting over that furious pennant race, I was dreaming restless dreams about it. — Smoky Joe Wood

So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth, is how you'll be loved. I tried to medicate my own fucked up little mind with chemicals and adrenaline, tasting sweeter every night, shaking louder every time. Sitting wide awake in bed until the world disappears, writing poetry to concentrate on something real while waiting for the love to arrive.
I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.
(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.) — Charlotte Eriksson

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. — Octavio Paz

Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams. — Lew Wallace

You are asleep and have forgetten that you are dreaming. You mistakenly believe you are awake. — Frederick Lenz

Sometimes one awakes with the knowledge that unrecallable dreams have been lining your sleep, and though you feel rested, it is the rest of one who has lived for hours in an alternate world, another realm. — Amy Rachel Peterson

But I'm always dreaming, even when I'm awake; it is never finished. — Peter S. Beagle

In most of our dreams, our inner eye of reflection is shut and we sleep within our sleep. The exception takes place when we seem to awake within our dreams, without disturbing or ending the dream state, and learn to recognize that we are dreaming while the dream is still happening. — Stephen LaBerge

I think what I need to do is stay awake while I'm sleeping so I can see what I'm dreaming better!! — Neil Leckman

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her - to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn't forget her - but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she'd stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too - drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep - I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn't actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness. — Donna Tartt

You can ignore me, Rachel, and you can try to treat me as a friend, but none of that will erase the fact that I think about kissing you every second I'm awake and dream at night of my hands on your body. And it sure as hell won't erase that I'm terrified by how much I like you. — Katie McGarry

The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake. — Bertrand Russell

We could be dreaming all the time, but we do not perceive those dreams while we are awake because consciousness (like the sun obscuring stars during the day) is much too brilliant to allow the unconscious content so much definition. — Brian Herbert

Dreaming is good - especially if you dream when you are awake. Remember dreams will remain a dream if you don't act on them. — Debasish Mridha

And then, just at that moment, when I'm no longer sure if I'm dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine. — Lauren Oliver

He who dreams ... does not know he is dreaming ... Only when he awakens does he know he has dreamt. But there is also the great awakening (ta-chiao), and then we see that [everything] here is nothing but a great dream. Of course, the fools believe that they are already awake-what foolishness! Confucius and you, both of you, are dreams; and I, who tell you this, am also a dream. — Zhuangzi

What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake? — Jonathan Safran Foer

Before you start dreaming, make sure you're awake so that you could follow. — Evans Biya

Now I'm awake and you're here. Now I'm dreaming and you're here. Now I have nothing but days. Never nights. — Pleasefindthis

O man! Attend!
What does deep midnight's voice contend?
I slept my sleep,
And now awake at dreaming's end:
The world is deep,
And deeper than day can comprehend.
Deep is its woe,
Joy - deeper than heart's agony:
Woe says: Fade! Go!
But all joy wants eternity,
Wants deep, wants deep eternity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change. — Haruki Murakami

When you consider your dreaming explorations, and
where you may be pulled within those journeys, be aware
that your daytime actions also bring consequences to alternate realms, and that there are beings who will actively waylay your voyaging awareness. To be waylaid is to waste
one's life and one's time. — Lujan Matus

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry, Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry. — Omar Khayyam

IN THE MIDDLE AGES BOTH SIDES OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, WITHIN AS WELL AS WITHOUT, LAY DREAMING OR HALF AWAKE BENEATH A COMMON VEIL. THE VEIL WAS WOVEN OF FAITH, ILLUSION, AND CHILDISH PREPOSSESSION, THROUGH WHICH THE WORLD AND HISTORY WERE SEEN CLAD IN STRANGE HUES. MAN WAS CONSCIOUS OF HIMSELF ONLY AS A MEMBER OF A RACE, PEOPLE, PARTY, FAMILY, OR CORPORATION - ONLY THROUGH SOME GENERAL CATEGORY. IN ITALY THIS VEIL FIRST MELTED INTO AIR; AN OBJECTIVE TREATMENT AND CONSIDERATION OF THE STATE AND OF ALL THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD BECAME POSSIBLE. THE SUBJECTIVE SIDE AT THE SAME TIME ASSERTED ITSELF WITH CORRESPONDING EMPHASIS; MAN BECAME A SPIRITUAL INDIVIDUAL, AND RECOGNIZED HIMSELF AS SUCH. — Erich Fromm

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us. — Jane Roberts

Pause now to ask yourself the following question: 'Am I dreaming or awake, right now?' Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer. — Stephen LaBerge

The owl," he was saying, "is one of the most curious creatures. A bird that stays awake when the rest of the world sleeps. They can see in the dark. I find that so interesting, to be mired in reality when the rest of the world is dreaming. What does he see and what does he know that the rest of the world is missing? — M.J. Rose

Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams. — Gustave Flaubert

In 1973, I broke off from the therapy and decided I could go through one of those episodes on my own, in my house. I found there is no real need to be locked up. I found that I was able to use that kind of awake dreaming that you go into during insanity and look at it and live with it and relate to it and become friends with it. — Dory Previn

It seems that I have been held in some dreaming state
A tourist in the waking world world, never quite awake.
No kiss, no gentle word could wake me from this slumber,
Until I realised that it was you who held me under. — Florence + The Machine

Your dreaming self seeks to tell you something your waking ears will not hear — Jacqueline Carey

I'm dreaming that I am awake. — Margaret Atwood

I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self. — Fernando Pessoa

I sang in the shower, lay awake dreaming. I wore my old dresses, my brightly colored cardigans and my satin pumps, and let myself be enclosed in a bubble of happiness, conscious that bubbles only ever existed for so long before they popped anyway. — Jojo Moyes

What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You are dreaming with the brain awake. — Miguel Ruiz

You're only awake when you realise you're awake and when you're dreaming, it is just as real, whatever happens is just as real - whether you actually do die in a dream or fulfil whatever you're doing in a dream, it's, there's nobody to tell me it isn't as real as this now, because how do you know? — John Lennon

You know that place between sleep and awake, that place where you still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you. That's where I'll be waiting. — J.M. Barrie

I would say she's in the place where the river of time runs into, where the holograms go when they disappear into the air, she is neither completely dreaming, nor fully awake, — Annie Fisher

I needed a moment to understand that I'd been dreaming, that I had come awake, and another moment to remember where I had gone to bed. — Dean Koontz

A lot of our young people are sleep-walking, dreaming that they're awake, and lots of aspects of society initially go about keeping it so. — Lorraine Toussaint

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

On a lazy Saturday morning when you're lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, there is a space where fantasy and reality become one. Are you awake, or are you dreaming? You see people and things; some are familiar; some are strange. You talk, you feel, but you move without walking; you fly without wings. Your mind and your body exist, but on separate planes. Time stands still. For me, this is the feeling I have when ideas come. — Lynn Johnston

Margaret was not dreaming nor was she quite asleep, although the moon looking at her face believed she was. She was experiencing the thing insomniacs dread-- not being awake but the ticky-tacky thoughts that fill in the space where sleep ought to be. Rags and swatches; draincloths and crumpled paper napkins. Old griefs and embarrassments; jealousies and offense. Just common ignoble scraps not deep enough for dreaming and not light enough to dismiss. — Toni Morrison

I don't know if I'm dreaming when I sleep or sleeping while I'm awake, but I have reoccurring dreams my mind cannot take — Stanley Victor Paskavich

And then there are the dreams that feel as authentic as reality itself, that seem to exist just as your own life does. Where the emotions you experience there carry over to when you're awake. They are so real, so genuine, that you begin to question your own sanity. And you know that when the day comes that you finally stop dreaming them, you will never stop remembering. — E.J. Mellow

A dream isn't worth the sleep, unless you are wide awake when dreaming it. — Bidemi Mark-Mordi

I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. "The road," he'd always said, when she shook him awake and asked what he'd been dreaming of. He'd said, "I hope you never remember it. — Emily St. John Mandel

She said, I'm going to miss you when you when I wake up.
Don't wake up, he answered.
But he did.
Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said. "Did I wake you? I didn't mean to."
It took him a velvety moment to understand that this was real. The air was quiet. An insect beat it's clear wings. She brushed hair from his brow. Now he was very awake.
"You were sleeping so sweetly," she said.
"Dreaming" He touched her tender mouth.
"About what?"
"Come closer, and I will tell you."
But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.
She curled her fingers into the green earth — Marie Rutkoski

Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war. — J.G. Ballard

Prof. Christoph Heubeck said, "Dream on, dreams can come true. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming. — Ian Fleming

We shall lie down," Lincoln warned, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State." Lincoln — Eric Foner

The young May moon is beaming, love.
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love.
How sweet to rove,
Through Morna's grove,
When the drowsy world is dreaming, love!
Then awake! - the heavens look bright, my dear,
'Tis never too late for delight, my dear,
And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear! — Thomas Moore

Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination. — Richard Dawkins

I've dreamed a lot. I'm tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything. — Fernando Pessoa

Late in the night I pay
the unrest I own
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
is my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it,
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and heal men.
But the end, too, is part
of the pattern, the last
labor of the heart:
to learn to lie still,
one with the earth
again, and let the world go. — Wendell Berry

I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead. — Philip Caputo

When I awake thinking of dreams I slept on, I often wonder, if the dreams ever wake up thinking of me? — Anthony Liccione

When did you know you were in love?
I didn't have an answer to that question. There hadn't been one specific moment. It was like gradually waking up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It's a slow process, but when you're awake, there's no mistaking it. — Jenny Han

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake. — Caryl Churchill

It is not until you awaken and become fully present that you will realize that you have not been present. It is not until you awaken that you will realize you have been asleep, dreaming that you are awake. — Leonard Jacobson

Your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view. A reverse eclipse. And you watch with your eyes closed. The white planet is half exposed, it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say. — Patrick DeWitt

Has my heart gone to sleep?
Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped working, the waterwheel
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?
No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of vast silence — Antonio Machado

Luckily we don't sleep standing. Who knows where the dream will take us! — Ljupka Cvetanova

Oh, to awake from dreaming! — Virginia Woolf

Awakening and owning the dreams that God has placed in our hearts isn't about getting stuff or attaining something. It's about embracing who we are and who he has created us to be. In him. He is our dream come true, and the one true love of our life. But we can't love him with our whole hearts when our hearts are asleep. To love Jesus means to risk coming awake, to risk wanting and desiring. — Stasi Eldredge

One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another. — Blaise Pascal

When you are awake, your mind is limited. When you are dreaming, your mind is unlimited. Creation is a genius. The mind is a powerful aspect to reality, but no one can truly tell you what reality is, or how reality should be. You can only tell yourself. However, what if you can tap into your mental functions, and truly blur the line to the point, that whether you are awake or asleep, your mind makes the world real? What's the difference between bending the world in your dream, and bending the world in reality? The truth is, there is no difference, when you live in imagination. — Lionel Suggs

When you go,
if you go,
And I should want to die,
there's nothing I'd be saved by
more than the time
you fell asleep in my arms
in a trust so gentle
I let the darkening room
drink up the evening, till
rest, or the new rain
lightly roused you awake.
I asked if you heard the rain in your dream
and half dreaming still you only said, I love you. — Edwin Morgan

Is this all a dream?" That's the only thing that makes any sense.
"You aren't dreaming," he said, and she knew that was true. She was awake and had been every time they had met. "But if you were a dream, would you want to wake up?" he asked.
A good question. A fair question. A hard question, but one she answered easily.
"Never. — Tiffany Reisz

Reality is a magic lady, sometimes very mysterious. To me she is very passionate. She is real not only when she is awake, walking down the streets, but also at night when she is dreaming or when she is having nightmares. When I am writing, I am always paying tribute to her - to that lady called Reality. — Eduardo Galeano

If humans did not manufacture some of their own to appear like better people, people would not aspire to be someone else. They would stop dreaming. And if people didn't dream, they would be awake to discover the wonderful misery of being. There are no singular great people. There is only a small percentage of people manufactured to look significant, for the purpose of creating the feeling of mass insignificance. — Craig Stone

During dreaming, we're tuned inward, we experience vivid visual imagery, our conventional logic system is turned down, and social norms are loosened, all of which can lead to making more creative associations than we make when we're awake and our brain is censoring the illogical," she says. — Andrea Rock

When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. — Vladimir Nabokov

But whether I touch him or I run, whether I'm dreaming or I'm awake, on his birthday or on all other days, my whole life has been contaminated with the fact that he is dead. — Jean Hegland

Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive. — Paul Scott

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real. — Ruth Rendell

It was only that night, dreaming forbidden dreams of Laurence and the clear attraction he had already displayed towards her, that the dream was disturbed. She woke to pain, her eyes and mouth flashing open in a wordless scream as two strong fangs pierced her neck. A body lay across hers, warm and strong as she felt the life being sucked out of her. The moment he knew she was awake, Laurence had pulled back from feeding and smiled at her with a bloody grin. 'You are mine now, Shiloh. You may never leave this house until the day I die.' He had warned her, planting a tormenting kiss on her lips before resuming his feed. — Elaine White

Underneath my imagination there didn't seem to be anything solid except for the space where I shoved my pain and sadness. Besides that, there were only twisted steel threads of axiety, woven through my body and brain, wired into me like a constant warning. Watch out, stay still, move away, stay silent, fight back, run and hide. Even when I was dreaming, but more so when I was awake, there was the constant fear of being caught off-guard, or by the wrong person at the wrong time. — Jane Devin

unheard and unseen
{ protected }

from the vision of what
we would look cute together
really means

words
do
{ lie }

amongst the
lol's and just kiddings

{ hearts }

lay awake
dreaming nightmares of
unicorns
disguised
as

demons
chase away

{ hope }
causing it
to remain — N'Zuri Za Austin

Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which as a mother her child, carries life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait. — George MacDonald

The poet: just another sleepwalker dreaming he's awake. — Marty Rubin

Dreaming was easy. I could dream for hours - not thinking, not wondering, not conscious of the passing of time. I could dream at all times and in all places - and this place was made for dreams. I did not awake until Andrew's shadow fell across my knees. "Where are the sand-castles, Jane?" "They were castles in Spain," I replied, smiling up at him. "But the real reason I wanted to come to the sea was pearls. Pearls like sea-water and sunshine." He stooped over the pool and said, "Not real pearls, — D.E. Stevenson

When your dreams get fulfilled in dreams, wouldn't you rather skip reality? — Nico J. Genes

The sleeper dreams of an egg and knows an egg. He dreams the egg is hatched and a bird rises from the shell. Awake, he sees an egg and knows a star, and the star will shine. But how shall we wake the sleeper from his dreaming? How shall we enter his chamber and wake him to power? We can show him the door, but how shall we give him the key? — Kristin Kladstrup

Neo: You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?
Choi: All the time. It's called mescaline, it's the only way to fly — Matrix

There hadn't been one specific moment. It was like gradualy waking up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It's a slow process, but when you're awake, there's no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love. — Jenny Han

The best thing about being an author is the unspoken approval to dream while awake. — Alex G. Zarate

Why me?"
"Because I lie awake at night, dreaming of all the things I want to do to your body, of leaving marks on your skin so that everyone knows that you are mine. And only mine." He leaned back against one of the larger metal tables. "But you fight yourself even as you fight me, and I love that, too. I love watching you squirm, because it gives me some idea of how you'll look when I'm inside you. I want to be your last thought at night, and your first taste at dawn. I want to teach you, own you, control you. — Nenia Campbell

This was like walking the line between dream and sleep. The night-sharp balance of being asleep enough to dream and awake enough to remember what he wanted. — Maggie Stiefvater

I had a dream about you. Again. In fact I've had so many dreams about you that I can almost feel your skin under my fingertips and your breath every time we kiss. This time when you pulled me closer, even though I couldn't see you, I knew it was you. I've heard your footsteps, and recognized them instantly. I'd recognize them anywhere, among many others. The way I yearn for you, you are always expected. And now I expect you to do just that. Kiss me. This time I am asking for it, because I need to make sure I am awake. — Aleksandra Ninkovic

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. — Ursula K. Le Guin

138. We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse - and forget it immediately. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But how does it happen that the mind of the dreamer is always so mistaken, while the same mind when awake is accustomed to be so temperate, careful, and skeptical with regard to its hypotheses? so that the first random hypothesis for the explanation of a feeling suffices for him to believe immediately in its truth? (For in dreaming we believe in the dream as if it were a reality, i.e. we think our hypothesis completely proved.) I — Friedrich Nietzsche

We dream - it is good we are dreaming - It would hurt us - were we awake - But since it is playing - kill us, And we are playing - shriek - What harm? Men die - externally - It is a truth - of Blood - But we - are dying in Drama - And Drama - is never dead - Cautious - We jar each other - And either - open the eyes - Lest the Phantasm - prove the Mistake - And the livid Surprise Cool us to Shafts of Granite - With just an Age - and Name - And perhaps a phrase in Egyptian - It's prudenter - to dream - — Emily Dickinson