Great Throughts Treasury

"Being 'awake in your dreams' provides the opportunity for unique and compelling adventures rarely surpassed elsewhere in life... [As a skill] it has considerable potential for promoting personal growth and self-development, enhancing self-confidence, improving mental and physical health, facilitating creative problem-solving, and helping you to progress on the path to self-mastery."

"A man s greatest glory doesn’t consist in never falling, but in rising every time he falls."

"Dream research is a wonderful field. All you do is sleep for a living."

"Be true to yourself and you will never fail."

"But why are people interested in learning to be conscious in their dreams? According to my own experience, and the testimony of thousands of other lucid dreamers, lucid dreams can be extraordinarily vivid, intense, pleasurable, and exhilarating. People frequently consider their lucid dreams as among the most wonderful experiences of their lives. If this were all there were to it, lucid dreams would be delightful, but ultimately trivial entertainment. However, as many have already discovered, you can use lucid dreaming to improve the quality of your waking life. Thousands of people have written to me at Stanford telling how they are using the knowledge and experience they have acquired in lucid dreams to help them get more out of living."

"Have faith in your dreams and someday your rainbow will come smiling through. No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep believing, the dream that you wish will come true."

"Dreaming is perception unconstrained by sensory input. And vice versa, what is perception is what we’re doing right now; dreaming, constrained by sensory input."

"I just told you my dreams and you made me see that I could walk into the sun and I could still be me and now I can't deny nothing lasts forever."

"I suggested that dreams are simulations of the world created by our perceptual systems. The introduction to waking perception that you just read will help you understand this theory. Consider, first of all, how sleep modifies the process of perception. During REM sleep, as you learned in chapter 2, sensory input from the outside world and body movement are both suppressed, while the entire brain is highly active. The activity of the brain raises certain schemas above their perceptual thresholds. These schemas enter consciousness, causing the dreamer to see, feel, hear, and experience things not present in the external environment. Ordinarily, if you were to see something that wasn't really there, contradictory sensory input would rapidly correct your mistaken impression. Why doesn't the same thing happen during dreaming? The answer is because there is little or no sensory input available to the brain for correcting such mistakes."

"Not all lucid dreams are useful but they all have a sense of wonder about them. If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams, too?"

"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."

"The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary."

"The fact that both ego and self say "I" is a source of confusion and misidentification. The well-informed ego says truly, "I am what I know myself to be." The self says merely, "I am.”"

"Although the events we appear to perceive in dreams are illusory, our feelings in response to dream content are real. Indeed, most of the events we experience in dreams are real; when we experience feelings, say, anxiety or ecstasy, in dreams, we really do feel anxious or ecstatic at the time."

"Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?"

"From early childhood, I was interested in understanding how the world worked, and assumed I would be some kind of physical scientist or chemist. But the truth was, I didn't know there was another kind of world, the inner world, that was just as interesting, if not more relevant, than what was going on in the outside world."

"Dreams look real, but they're in your mind, so you realize that the physical world is also a construction, which shows that the mind can affect reality in more ways than you can imagine."

"Dreams are a reservoir of knowledge and experience yet they are often overlooked as a vehicle for exploring reality. In the dream state our bodies are at rest, yet we see and hear, move about and are even able to learn. When we make good use of the dream state it is almost as if our lives were doubled: instead of a hundred years we live to be two hundred.[Tibetan Buddhist Tarthang Tulku]"

"I have high-tech tastes. If I had $100 million, I would spend it on research equipment rather than a yacht."

"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."

"In the dream state, the only essential difference from waking is the relative absence of sensory input, which makes dreaming a special case of perception without sensory input."

"I'd say that we dream primarily the same way that we have consciousness of the world for the same reason. Basically, that our brains evolve to simulate reality and to control what's happening around us."

"It is certainly important to be looking for cures to medical disorders, but it is equally important to conduct research on human health and well-being."

"Lucid dreaming has considerable potential for promoting personal growth and self-development, enhancing self-confidence, improving mental and physical health, facilitating creative problem solving and helping you to progress on the path to self-mastery."

"Lucid dreaming lets you make use of the dream state that comes to you every night to have a stimulating reality."

"What is consciousness? Our brain simulates reality. So, our everyday experiences are a form of dreaming, which is to say, they are mental models, simulations, not the things they appear to be."

"You just don't get funding to go out and find God. Even if you did, you'd have to first define what you mean by 'God.'"

"Your experience is a dream; so is my experience. This stuff about how the frontal cortex is repressed during dreaming, lucid dreaming presents an obvious contradiction to it. The only difference is sensory input."

"Some people have vivid imagination, some not so vivid, but everybody has vivid dreams."

"The consciousness of lucid dreaming is a cultural evolution. It's something that we are talking about and learning about, not biological evolution."

"We dream every night, all the time."

"We don't teach our children how to dream."