Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air;And like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great glove itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.
Sleep occupies a third of our life. It is the consolation to the woes of our days or the woe of their pleasures; but I have never found that sleep was a rest. After a swoon of a few minutes a new life begins, freed from conditions of time and space, and doubtless like the life which awaits us after death. Who knows whether there does not exist a link between these two existences, and whether it is not possible for the soul now to bind them together?
There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, "shattered," as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there's a core, and providing they're willing to do the work.
Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
I think we all, at one time or another, have been to this impossible place, the enchanted land that exists between our dreams and reality. Most of us are only held there for a moment, long enough to know it feels weird; we then choose one or the other. I was stuck there, unable to move from one to the next. I was swaddled in Xanadu itself, wrapped up in the mysteries of the mind – both the conscious and subconscious simultaneously. It was amazing.
And from the top of the building I look down upon the world and see the crowds of people in the city I have made and the world that I have created.This universe, my universe, dies with me. I will jump and I will die and yet, I will live, as I always do. I will live and die and murder, a massacre of my people. And I watch as the girl’s bare feet leap and her naked body falls. Down, down, down, she falls. She drops. Into the fires of a hell of my making.
Maybe, life is a kind of waking dream.Maybe, it's a double-dream with a false awakening.Maybe, the dream only becomes lucid and truly luminous given the fuller perspective of life after one's own wake.Maybe, the pictures never stop.Doesn't the existence of dreams and higher consciousness during the years of blackouts of a lifetime, whether longer or shorter, give us a valid premise to hope that another highly spiritual state may await our passing?
And in that moment he realised that even though the dreams they’d seen together, hoped for and believed in had come true, it wasn’t enough. It was far from reality which was lonesome and woeful. And conceived that love had no lastingness, it was brief and momentary. It wasn’t the cherishable sensation spoken of in movies and written in books, rather a delusion inclined on ruining the very spirit, giving way to mournfulness and disappointment.
Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul.
You don't have to do this," Ronan said."There isn't anything else, man.""There's reality."Kavinsky laughed the word. "Reality! Reality's what other people dream for you.""Reality's where other people are," Ronan replied. He stretched out his arms. "What's here, K? Nothing! No one!""Just us."There was a heavy understanding in that statement, amplified by the dream. I know what you are, Kavinsky had said."That's not enough," Ronan replied.
But no-one came here to live an ordinary life. Despite what our somnambulistic, mythless society society tells us — a place stuffed to the gilders with unawake, unthinking folk ruled by shoulds, oughts and have-tos; people who have no understanding of themselves; individuals afraid to acknowledge, let alone live their dreams — you came here to weave your unique essence and vision into the world, thus rendering it magnificent, both for yourself and others.
I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after."It's about feeling," Camille had insisted.I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk.
But one day she handed me some more letters from people who had been researching fruitlessly through old newspapers, hoping to find the "real" events. I remarked that it was sad they wasted so much time. "Yes," said Joan - and then, absently, "but something did happen." Whether the something happened in the newspapers, in some anecdote she has heard or in her imagination's interconnections with some other world or time, I had no idea- and I knew better than to ask.
I had a dream about you. We were playing chess, and logically we were both wearing football helmets. You were winning, so I started to complain that perhaps I was losing because I was suffering from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, due to the violent nature of the game. Then you took off your helmet to reveal the fact that you had no hair or skull, and you had waffles for brains. So I poured syrup on my gloved hands and scooped out your intelligence to consume it.
Learning about freedom, for . . . the very essence of human existence, knowledge, as the mind is an element that enables us to shift the winds of luck, reshape the forces of fate or destiny, and, ultimately, empower us to become free authors of our own lives, for the true art of human expression is the ability to express our dreams, thoughts, and emotions as we feel them or as they come to mind, as we search for universal equality, justice, peace, love, truth, and reality.
