Dreams and sleep - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

- Edgar Allan Poe, ''Eleanora,'' revised (1845)

All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

- Edgar Allan Poe, ''A Dream within a Dream,'' revised (1849)

Our dreams are a second life. Not without a shudder do I pass through the gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world.

- Gйrard de Nerval, Aurelia (1854), translated by Richard Aldington (1932)

''If he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?'' ''Where I am now, of course,'' said Alice. ''Not you!'' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ''You'd be nowhere.Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!''

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872)

How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads, to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.

- Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. [. . .] We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

- H. P. Lovecraft, ''Beyond theWall of Sleep'' (1919)

The more he withdrew from the world around him, the more wonderful became his dreams.

- H. P. Lovecraft, ''Celephais'' (1922)

Dreams are a serious psychic disease.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924)

, translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

At last he came to Earth, where dreams must come true, for there is a law against their failure.

- Robert Sheckley, ''Love, Incorporated'' (1956)

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again, the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable, as they had been at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Golgotha and Gomorrah.

- J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)

In dreams, some of us walk the stars. In dreams, some of us ride the whelming brine of space, where every port is a shining one, and none are beyond our reach. Some of us, in dreams, cannot reach beyond the walls of our own little sleep.

- Joseph Stefano and Bill S. Ballinger, ''The Mice,'' episode of The Outer Limits (1964)

When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating.

- Gene Roddenberry, ''The Menagerie'' Part 2, episode of Star Trek (1966)

A dream. Compensation, by the state, for reality. Night after night. It's almost worse than being awake. No, he decided. Nothing is worse than being awake.

- Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)

''Unusual and violent mental activity takes place while you sleep. First, you enter a world that to some extent is familiar. [. . .] In your mind you are where genuine personal friends, enemies, and socially-contacted figures speak and act.'' ''In other words,'' Provoni said, ''dreams.'' ''This sort of dreaming forms a kind of recapitulation of the day, of what you've done, whom you've thought about, talked with. This does not alarm us. It is the next phase. You fall into a deeper interior level; you encounter personages you never knew, situations you've never been in. A disintegration of your self, of you as such, begins; you merge with primordial entities of a godlike type, possessing enormous power.''

- Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)

Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes . . .

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''TheWord forWorld Is Forest'' (1972)

It was only in their waking hours, Quentin let me know, that men allowed themselves to be separated by the artificial barriers of color, ethnics, politics, 97 Dreams and Sleep ideology, hunger, territorial imperatives. In their repose all men were one because all slept, and slept alike. Sleep, you might almost say, was humanity's least common denominator, because most common, indeed, universal. Sun makes men aliens to each other and, thus, themselves. Night unites. Mankind could open itself to, and assert, its true physiological community only with eyes closed.

- Bernard Wolfe, ''The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements'' (1972)

''What's the basic idea, that if you make people sleep a lot you'll cut down on wars?'' [. . .] ''Mr. Rengs, well-rested people don't hit each other, asleep or awake. If we can get the insomniacs dozing off again, and improve the repose of the tossers and turners, you see how that ushers in a newepoch. The next great slogan may be, Sleepers of the world, unite!''

- Bernard Wolfe, ''The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements'' (1972)

Don't dream it - be it.

- Richard O'Brien, ''Floorshow (Rose Tint MyWorld),'' The Rocky Horror Show (play, 1973)

The more creative and imaginative a person, the richer and more original his dreams.

- Philip Josй Farmer, ''Stations of the Nightmare - Part One'' (1974)

''Why do they hate me?'' asked Preacher Abraham. ''Because you speak of the good that all men dream of as if it could be real.''

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Children's Crusade'' (1974)

I've had my child-dreams, my naming-dreams, my hunting-dreams. Now it is time for my dying-dreams.

- Sydney J. Van Scyoc, ''Bluewater Dreams'' (1981)

I'd seen enough strangers' dreams, in the mixing room at the Autonomic Pilot, to know that most people's inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one's own consciousness.

- William Gibson, ''TheWinter Market'' (1985)

Machine dreams hold a special vertigo.

- William Gibson, Count Zero (1986)

No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it.

- Richard Bach, One (1988)

It's too bad we only had the courage to live our lives fully in dreams.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, ''Before I Wake'' (1990)