On Dreams

This is the quote that made me start keeping a dream journal in 2001. I loved the metaphor of the soul as author. For years, I dismissed my night dreams as random neural firing, but Norman's words made me reconsider. I started writing them down, and patterns emerged - recurring themes about being unprepared, about discovering new rooms in familiar houses. These weren't prophecies, but they were revealing. They showed me anxieties I wasn't acknowledging during waking hours.

I encountered this quote at a conference in 2003, and it immediately went into my email signature for about six months. What I appreciate is the word "beauty" - not the practicality, not the profitability, but the beauty. Roosevelt understood that dreams worth pursuing are the ones that move us aesthetically, emotionally. This quote saw me through the launch of two major projects that everyone said were too ambitious. They were right that the projects were ambitious, but wrong about what that meant.

Wilson's imagery here is remarkable - the "soft haze of a spring day" and "red fire of a long winter's evening." He understood that dreams don't arrive in boardrooms with PowerPoint presentations. They come in quiet moments, in transitions between activities, in the spaces where our minds wander. The second part is equally important: dreams require active protection. They're fragile. This quote reminds me that having the dream is just the first step; the real work is nourishing it against all the forces that would let it wither.

Nin captures something here that took me years to understand: dreams and action aren't sequential, they're cyclical. You don't dream, then act, then you're done. You dream, you act, that action creates new information and experiences, which generate new dreams. This cycle is life itself. I've noticed this in my own work - every completed project doesn't close a door, it opens three new ones. That's not failure to finish, that's the interdependence Nin describes.

This is the most honest quote in this collection. Yezierska was an immigrant who worked in sweatshops, and her words carry the weight of someone for whom dreams weren't inspirational posters - they were survival. When you have nothing material, dreams are currency. This quote grounds the whole collection, reminding me that dreaming isn't a luxury of the comfortable. Sometimes it's the only resource available to people with nothing else.

Proust gives permission here to ignore all the people who tell us to "be realistic." The danger isn't in dreaming - the danger is in timid dreaming, in half-hearted vision. This quote appeared on my desk during a period when I was scaling back my ambitions to be "sensible." Proust helped me recognize that sensible was just another word for small. I went back to the bigger vision. It didn't all work out, but that's not the point.

After all the inspirational quotes about dreaming big, Valéry provides the necessary counterweight. Dreams require action. They require waking up - literally and metaphorically - and doing the unglamorous work. I keep this quote balanced against the Proust quote because both are true simultaneously. Dream all the time, yes, but also wake up and execute. The tension between these two truths is where actual progress lives.

This reframes poverty in a way that initially made me uncomfortable, but has proven wise over time. I've met people with significant wealth who struck me as desperately poor - they had no vision for anything beyond what they already possessed. And I've met people with very little money who were rich in the sense Kemp describes. They had dreams, plans, visions of different futures. That's a form of wealth that can't be taxed or inflated away.

Shelley captures the private nature of dreams beautifully. Before dreams become projects or companies or movements, they're intimate, personal, sometimes embarrassingly grandiose visions that we wouldn't dare share with anyone. That privacy is important. Dreams need time to develop before exposure to the criticism and "reality checks" that inevitably come. I've learned to protect early-stage dreams the way Shelley describes - as private refuges that belong only to me until they're strong enough to withstand scrutiny.

Schiller links dreaming with the willingness to be wrong, and that's profoundly important. Every dream that turned into reality started as something many people dismissed as wrong, impractical, or foolish. The courage to dream requires the courage to be wrong publicly. This quote has accompanied me through several ideas that others told me were mistakes. Some of them were mistakes. But the alternative - never dreaming because you might be wrong - is far worse.

This is my favorite quote about the evolution of dreams over a lifetime. We're not meant to chase the same dream from age twenty to age seventy. Dreams should evolve as we evolve. The "one-dream man" Goddard pities is someone stuck in a vision they formed decades ago, unable to let it go even when life has moved on. I've had to let several dreams die, and each time, Goddard's words reminded me that new dreams would arrive. They always have.