Un'idea di vita.: Dreams in literature

“I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept on to my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it is my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible….but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms. Arthur Miller, After the Fall.

“You said ‘They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.’ ‘What,’ I asked you, ‘is harmless about a dreamer, and what’ I asked you, ‘is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.’

"Camino Real". Tennessee Williams

“A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.”

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Lord Jim.

“A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney.”

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952.

Our life is two-fold: Sleep hath it’s own world /A boundary between the things misnamed / Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world / And a Wide realm of wild reality. / And dreams in their development have breath, / And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; / They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, / They take a weight from off our waking toils, / They do divide our being; they become / A portion of ourselves as of time, / And look like heralds of eternity; / They pass like spirits of the past, — they speak /------>

------> Like Sybils of the future; they have power / the tyranny of pleasure and of pain; / They make us what we were not what they will, / And shake us with the vision that’s gone by, / The dread of vanish’d shadows Are they so? / Is not the past all shadow? — What are they? / Creations of the mind? The mind can make / Substance, and people planets of its own / With beings brighter than have been, and give | A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.” 

Lord Byron, from The Dream, 1816

“I’ll dreamt that I’ll dweath mid warblers’ walls when throstles and choughs to my sigh hiehied”.

James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 1939

“While hollering and breathing so long so deep / Memory came on and dove down to my sleep / Dreaming this memory of space all around / Silence becomes breath becomes thought becomes sound.”

John Hardee, 1997

“Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese toasted, mostly.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, 1883.

“A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and showed it to Nancy. Nancy caught one with two spots and showed it to Judy. Then Judy caught one with three spots and Nancy one with four. Because (the child explained) the dots showed how old the ladybugs were. She told this dream to her mother, who had her repeat it to her father at breakfast ---->

-----> Piet was moved, beholding his daughter launched intoanother dimension of life. Like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery the screened porch (neither they nor the Thornes had one; who?), the ladybugs (with turtles the most toylike of creatures), the mysterious power of numbers, that generates space and time. Piet saw down a long amplifying corridor of her dreams, and wanted to hear her tell them, to grow older with her, to shelter her forever.”

John Updike, Couples, 1968.

“Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple. ‘I won’t!’ said Alice. ‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. ‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’ At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her; she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tired to beat them off, and found herself----->

-----> lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face. ‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister. ‘Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!’ So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, 1865

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited. No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn.---->

----->Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkempt, not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realized what had happened.----->

----->Nature had come into her own again, and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way, had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the orders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church.---->

------> And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered surely the miles had multiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all.----->

-----> I came upon it suddenly There was Manderley secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.”

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938.

“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”

Shakespeare, Hamlet

‘I sometimes dream of devils. It’s night, I’m in my room, and suddenly there are devils everywhere. In all the corners and under the table, and they open doors, and behind the doors there are crowds of them, and they all want to come in and seize me. And they are already coming near and taking hold of me, But suddenly I cross myself and they draw back, they are afraid, only they don’t go away, but stand near the door and in the corners, waiting.------>

------>And then I’m suddenly overcome by a desire to begin cursing God in a loud voice, and I begin cursing him and they all rush at me again in a crowd, they’re so pleased, and they’re again about to lay hands on me and I cross myself again and they draw back at once. It’s great fun. Oh, it takes my breath away.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880.

“Captain Flume slept like a log most nights and merely DREAMED he was awake. So convincing were these dreams of lying awake that he awoke from them each morning in complete exhaustion and fell right back to sleep.”

Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961.

“Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been “What’s the matter?” “I dreamt–” he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking. He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream.---->

-----> It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occured inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances…”

George Orwell, 1984.

“All dreams of the soul/End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.”

W.B. Yeats, The Phases of the Moon, 1919.