18 definitions
An Alarm clock (n.) rings, and the dream has already built a long story whose logically indispensable climax is exactly that ringing — as if the whole dream had been leading up to it.
Bereavement (n.) under whose shadow we fall asleep is blotted out of the dream, while the wart on a stranger's forehead passed in the street gets a part to play.
The Categorical imperative (n.) dogs us even into sleep: a dreamer swallows 3×3=20 without a qualm yet never loses track of right and wrong.
Denial (n.) such as 'I should never dream of such a thing' admits what it denies — by feeling obliged to disown even our dreams, we confess our self-justification would be incomplete unless it reached that far.
A Dream (n.) can only be described by contrasts that sharpen into contradictions: it is hermetically sealed off from real life by an impassable gulf, and yet it can never get free of the real world.
A Dream (n.) can send a patriot, born after Napoleon died, on a sea-voyage to St. Helena to sell the ex-Emperor a bargain in Moselle wine — an alien life inserted between two consistent sections of the real one.
A Dream (n.) at its most sublime and at its most ridiculous alike must borrow every brick from what we have already experienced, outwardly or inwardly.
A Dream (n.) will tear its own cobweb: one alarm-clock becomes a village church bell, then sleigh bells, then a kitchen-maid's tower of plates crashing at the threshold.
A Dream (n.) pictures earthly beauty in heavenly splendour, shows our everyday fears in their ghastliest shape, and turns our amusement into jokes of indescribable pungency — so that waking, we feel the real world has never offered its equal.
A Dream (n.) can both sink below the level of humanity and rise to a virtuosity — tenderness, clarity, wit — that we never command when awake.
A Dream (n.) is as pure as the life: the purer the life the purer the dream, the more impure the one the more impure the other.
A Dream (n.) invents no sin; it merely dramatizes the Apostle's words, 'Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer', spinning out an impulse that passed through the waking mind.
A Dream (n.) can warn of moral infirmity just as physicians admit it can warn of hidden illness.
A Dreamer (n.) calculates without a qualm that three times three makes twenty, is unsurprised when a dog quotes poetry or a dead man walks to his own grave — until the strain of nonsense wakes him.
Guilt (n.) survives a dream as an obscure minimum: we may smile on waking at the elaborate structure, but not at the material it was built from.
Inhibition (n.) holds immoral impulse in check by day; sleep switches it off, so the dream reveals man's true nature — though not his whole nature.
Sleep (n.) is the moment our whole being, with all its forms of existence, disappears as if through an invisible trap-door.
Time (n.) and space are surmounted by dreams only as waking thought surmounts them — because a dream is merely a form of thought.