Quotes & Sayings About Waking Up To Reality

Have you ever felt as if your dreams were more memorable, more alive, than what you knew to be reality? Have your dreams ever seemed so tangible as to make you question upon waking if you'd truly only dreamt them? Have they at times been addictive enough to consume your waking hours; blurring actuality and pretend together until your wishes and passions stare back at you with open eyes?
If only dreams could be reality, that beautiful garden of sweet-smelling roses we all long for. But reality for me is no such bed of roses. It is nothing but a field of unwanted dandelions.
- From the thoughts of Annabelle Fancher — Richelle E. Goodrich

If you are reading this Libellus, you are a Dreamer, whether you have recognized this or not. Being a Dreamer carries responsibility, one most people are not willing to accept. Responsibility implies that one cannot blame another person for their actions, effectively avoiding causality. However, this is futile and childish to consider. If you are a Dreamer, you are creating the Waking Dream around you. If your life is good, it is because you have made it so and if it is bad, it is because you have made it so. No one else is responsible for your life other than you. — Michael Hibbard

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has. — Ted Chiang

My waking and sleeping seem mixed together. I'm walking in a dream half the time, and sleeping through reality the other half. — Margaret Weis

Nothing like being in a dream, then waking up to a nightmare. — Anthony Liccione

Even the damned can dream - infact, it's part of their torment. To escape, even for a second or two, to forget reality and drift, only to be yanked back into the waking world like a fish caught on a line ... Yes. In some ways that's even worse than to have no relief at all. That second of two, on awakening, when anything still seems possible — Joanne Harris

In reality, of course, it always does look after itself. All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. When it does anything more -when it tries too hard, for example, when it worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the future -it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill. In my present state, awareness was not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own. This meant that the physiological intelligence controlling the body was also on its own. For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way. — Aldous Huxley

Reality, as you currently experience it, is something like a waking dream. It is disguising deeper and more intensified levels of being and knowing. For those who are ready and willing, the doors to those other levels now stand open. — Daniel Pinchbeck

There is nothing like waking up at six in the morning and changing a baby's nappy to bring you face to face with life's reality. — Tony Blair

Trusting takes a different kind of energy. It takes showing up, despite your moods or personal whims. It is not inventing opportunities out of nowhere, but being obedient to respond to them as they come across your path. It's waking up, silencing insecurity, and taking steps forward even when you don't know how it will turn out. It means adjusting expectations at times, when reality doesn't look like the "dream" from your head. It is moving forward in anticipation, without knowing exactly what lies ahead. — Allison Vesterfelt

Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so. There were selfish reasons for my behavior. I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone-faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke. Somehow, at the bottom, I did not want this awful work to end. That's not courage. — Russell Banks

Waking up to a smell is a lot more satisfying than waking up to a noise. Instead of barging in uninvited and yanking you out into reality, smells enter your dreams with a silent knock and a polite Excuse me? — Adi Alsaid

The young girl who slept waking in some suspension so completely physical as to resemble the state before birth and as far removed from reality's other extreme as Ellen was from hers — William Faulkner

When we dream, we feel we are experiencing reality. What separates our waking feelings from our dream feelings?"
"When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream," writes Descartes. And he goes on: "How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream? — Jostein Gaarder

The lucid dream, located as it is at a crossroads between worlds and states of consciousness, places the magician in a unique position to influence the delicate balance of consciousness and the interplay it has on matter in the waking state, and is thus an opportunity to test one's ability in the art of adjusting the mutable fabric of Maya. — Zeena Schreck

Russia is now recognized as the center of the global 'mutiny' against global dictatorship of the US and EU. Its generally peaceful .. approach is in direct contrast to brutal and destabilizing methods used by the US and EU. The world is waking up to reality that there actually is, suddenly, some strong and determined resistance to Western imperialism. After decades of darkness, hope is emerging. — Andre Vltchek

Watching someone you love ... die? There are no words for how broken that makes a person. It's like waking up from a bad dream only to find out that it's you reality, it's like watching sunlight fade from the sky, like watching death suck the one you love dry, and being powerless to stop it. You may as well try to stop the waves from rolling in, or the sun from rising.In the end, the waves will roll, the sun will set, and death will come. The only thing you have a choice in? How you deal with it ... when it does. — Rachel Van Dyken

Waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of ... — Virginia Woolf

The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own. — Heraclitus

Many people are just waking to the reality that unlimited expansion, what we call progress, is not possible in this world, and maybe looking to monks (who seek to live within limitations) as well as rural Dakotans (whose limitations are forced upon them by isolation and a harsh climate) can teach us how to live more realistically. These unlikely people might also help us overcome the pathological fear of death and the inability to deal with sickness and old age that plague American society. — Kathleen Norris

What exactly is the difference between a dream and waking experience? What happens to the sense of "I" in dreamless sleep? And they sought invariants: in the constantly changing flow of human experience, is there anything that remains the same? In the constantly changing flow of thought, is there an observer who remains the same? Is there any thread of continuity, some level of reality higher than waking, in which these states of mind cohere? — Anonymous

Morpheus grunts, low in his chest. "I am not going to wait around and play second fiddle to Jebediah while your mortal side grows to understand and trust me."
"You're not second best. You and I get to have forever. Forever . Jeb has one life. It's only fair I spend it with him." I dance around the truth, as close as I'm willing to get.
" Fair? All this time, he's been with you during your waking hours. I've ever only had you in your dreams. I want you in reality. I've waited for what feels like a thousand years already. It is time for our forever to begin." — A.G. Howard

Sometimes, upon waking, the residual dream can be more appealing that reality, and one is reluctant to give it up. For a while, you feel like a ghost
Not fully materialized, and unable to manipulate your surroundings. Or else, it is the dream that haunts you. You wait with the promise of the next dream. — Craig Thompson

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind - as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off. — Vladimir Nabokov

"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state. — William Gibson

Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality. — Siri Hustvedt

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall ... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours. — Virginia Woolf

There's nothing more uplifting like the joy of waking up every morning knowing your family is safe from the perils of our society". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

Waking up is the dangerous act of worship. It's dangerous because worship is meant to produce lives fully attentive to reality as God sees it, and that's more than most of us want to deal with. — Mark Labberton

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours. — Philip K. Dick

Strong people stand up for themselves. Stronger people stand up for others. The irony is that while sleep sometimes brings nightmares, it's the reality of my waking hours that can cause me the greater fear. — Chris Gardner

We live in an incredibly dynamic universe that gives us what we wish for, like a waking dream — Cynthia Sue Larson

Do you ever experience that psychological quagmire where you wonder if reality really is dreamland and what you presume to be your waking state, fantasy?
When — Phileena Heuertz

Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality. — Lev Shestov

Not slumber, but sleep just this side of waking, where dreams fuse with reality. — Ellen Hopkins

The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming. — Adyashanti

It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare. — Donna Tartt

For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep. — Diana Gabaldon

Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his "premonitions." The world would remain for him, "in the light" of our "positive" sciences, what it was - a dark and sorrowful subterranean region - and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality." [1] In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it. — Lev Shestov

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both ... I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived. — Van Morrison

The sight of land, far away, brought you back to the reality the sea had made you forget. As you drew nearer to the beach, you would leave behind the waking dream the waves had thrown you into — Edouard Leve

Do you know the feeling you get when you are awakened in the middle of a dream? The dream story is still real and full of color, but the waking world is rushing back into your mind. And for a moment both worlds are true, and you cannot quite tell them apart. — Shannon Hale

But that's what dreams are for - to weave reality and fantasy and memory and stitch together something you can't hope for in waking life. To fulfill that little part of you that wants something so bad. — Kelley Armstrong

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking. — Angela Carter

Keep wondering whether your waking reality is a dream and you will wake up to the real. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

You know what I like to do? I love waking up early, making them breakfast, taking them to school, having time in the morning with them. With six kids, it's like a reality show. — Allan Houston

In the absence of sleep, my restless nights have been fueled by my overactive imagination, weaving waking dreams onto the canvas of conception. Filling my head with lots of ideas waiting to be born into reality. I am eager to return to my beautiful mistress, Creation! — Jaeda DeWalt

As an artist, i live in fantasy and flirt with reality. I'm an emotional magician of sorts. I paint my feelings onto the abstract canvas of a waking dream. I suspend my concepts in the ether's of otherworldly realms. This is the way my existence has always been. I am untethered, a traveler between worlds. I sinuously slip in and out of the real and surreal, until, they are one and the same. I do not like being shackled or chained, to the physical plane. — Jaeda DeWalt

In reality, there are no enemies; we're all souls in growth, waking up — James Redfield

But I can't control my dreams. I can't even remember them. For all I know I'm having the time of my life when I sleep, but I just can't remember. So I'm forced to live in a life I have no control over. A life where I'm either numb to everything or terrified of every thought that crosses my mind. If this is all just a dream, then it sure is a disappointing one.

But I still have time to try and control my dreams. I have time to try and make my dreams a reality in this waking life as well. The one bloody thing I have is time. I've got to remember that. I still have time. And despite everything, there is something reassuring about that. — F.K. Preston

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream. — Rene Magritte

I feel not unlike a small boy, waking from a bad dream to find reality not much of an improvement. — John Byrne

The dream I had was on a certain night. And in the dream the traveler appeared. What night was this? In the life of the traveler when was it that he came to spend the night in that rocky posada? He slept and events took place which I will tell you of, but when was this? You can see the problem. Let us say that the events which took place were a dream of this man whose own reality remains conjectural. How assess the world of that conjectural mind? And what with him is sleep and what is waking? How comes he to own the a world at night at all? Things need a ground to stand upon. As every soul requires a body. A dream within a dream makes other claims than what a man might suppose. — Cormac McCarthy