"The interpretation of dreams is the Via Regia to the knowledge of the unconscious in mental life."
Freud
"O God. I could be bounded in a nutshell,
and count myself king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams."
Shakespeare, Hamlet
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Skakespeare, The Tempest
"What if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand?"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successfully, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell. All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream."
Mozart, 1878
"One night I dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, content with my lot. Suddenly I awoke and I was Chuang-tzu again. Who am I in reality? A butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu or Chuang-tzu imagining he was a butterfly?"
Chuang-tzu, 3rd c. BC