Photo of bed sitting in bedroom with starry night sky overtaking the wall behind the bed. — Explore the meaning of dreams with these quotes about dreaming from psychologists, scientists, scholars, and the arts.

Quotes about the meaning of dreams

Almost everyone dreams, but dreaming is still a bit of a mystery to all of us. Let’s explore the meaning of dreams with these quotes about dreaming from psychologists, a neuroscientist, mythologist, and classic literature. We’ll even explore quotes about dreaming from a TV series and a philosophical aeronautics engineer from the 1920s.

#1 Quote about dreaming

“Heaven and hell are within us and all the gods are within us…They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the organs of the body in conflict with each other.” Joseph Campbell in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers

This is one of my all-time favorite quotes about dreaming. It’s from a documentary about myths featuring mythologist Joseph Campbell. This quote about dreaming really resonated with me when I watched this documentary series because I’d been paying attention to my own dreams and had started to believe that some of my dreams were very much about physical things happening in my body. In this documentary, Campbell talks about the important role of myths in society because myths open us up to the mystery of the world, point us towards the transcendent, and help us learn how to live. This quote about dreaming explains Campbell’s belief that dreams function in many ways as our own personal myths and play a similar role for each of us individually.

#2 Quote about dreaming

“What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.” Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams

You can’t have a list of quotes about dreaming without at least one quote from Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams is Freud’s classic work on dreams and dreaming. Freud believed that dreams are essentially wish fulfillment, meaning that we repress certain desires and wishes in our waking life and instead act them out in our dreams as a way of fulfilling those desires. Personally, I don’t really believe this. The Jungian approach to dreams resonates with me more, so the next quote about dreaming is from Jung.

#3 Quote about dreaming

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.” Carl Jung in Civilization in Transition, Volume 10 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung

Carl Jung was a student of Freud’s and worked closely with him for many years, but they parted ways, and Jung came to believe that dreams are not simply mechanisms of wish fulfillment, but instead that dreams point us towards hidden aspects of ourselves and help us to understand the totality of who we truly are. This quote about dreaming highlights Jung’s belief that our dreams show us our shadow self (things we don’t know about ourselves), and our anima (hidden feminine aspects in a man) or animus (hidden masculine aspects in a woman). In Jungian psychology, because our dreams show us these hidden aspects of ourselves, our dreams are viewed as guides on the way to becoming the unique and whole individuals we are on the deepest level, a process Jungian psychology calls individuation.

#4 Quote about dreaming

"Dreams show us how to find meaning in our lives, how to fulfill our own destiny, how to realize the greater potential of life within us." Marie-Louise Von Franz in The Way of the Dream

Marie-Louis Von Franz was a Jungian psychologist who worked closely with Carl Jung. The Way of the Dream is Von Franz’s book based on a documentary of the same name. In the documentary series, Marie-Louis Von Franz interprets dreams that were collected from street interviews with everyday people. Like the documentary, this book provides an accessible introduction to the Jungian approach to working with dreams. This quote about dreaming illustrates Von Franz’s Jungian belief that dreams help us to discover who we truly are.

#5 Quote about dreaming

“I've often felt that dreams are answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask.” Mulder in The X-Files

In The X-Files science fiction TV series, two FBI agents investigate all things strange and paranormal. This quote about dreams is from Season 2, Episode 12 which is about a police officer who has visions related to the unsolved murder of two FBI agents. This quote about dreaming from The X-Files aligns with the Jungian belief that dreams tell us about things we don’t yet consciously know.

#6 Quote about dreaming

“[D]reams are intricate tapestries of symbolism, and each image represents something going on within our own selves.” Robert A. Johnson in Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

Robert A. Johnson is another Jungian psychologist. This quote about dreams is from his book Inner Work which provides a practical and accessible way to use two important aspects of Jungian psychology, dream analysis and active imagination (a way to use your imagination to tap into your subconscious mind while you’re awake that yields similar imagery and symbols as dreaming). This quote about dreaming highlights Johnson’s Jungian belief that our dreams contain symbols that we should analyze and understand because dreams tell us something important about ourself and our life.

#7 Quote about dreaming

“Dreaming provides a unique suite of benefits to all species fortunate enough to experience it, humans included. Among these gifts are a consoling neurochemical bath that mollifies painful memories and a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity.” Matthew Walker in Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Matthew Walker is a neuroscientist and professor. This quote about dreaming is from his book Why We Sleep which explores the science behind sleeping and dreaming. This quote about dreaming takes a more scientific approach, but still recognizes sleep and dreaming as being integral to human development and creativity.

#8 Quote about dreaming

“I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind." Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights

This quote about dreaming from classic literature takes a more artistic approach to explaining the role dreams play in our lives. It reflects a view of dreaming that recognizes the ability of dreams to change our minds and our lives.

#9 Quote about dreaming

“Only the dreamer can say with any certainty what meanings his/her dreams may have.” Jeremey Taylor in The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life

Jeremy Taylor is Unitarian Universalist minister who uses the Jungian approach to dreams to help people make sense of past experiences, tap into creativity, and work through difficult aspects of life. This quote about dreaming from Taylor highlights the importance of understanding dream symbolism within the unique context of the dreamer’s life, an important principle in Jungian dreamwork.

#10 Quote about dreaming

“Was it possible that these phenomena were not abnormal, but normal? That dreams—dreams in general, all dreams, everybody's dreams—were composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions? That the universe was, after all, really stretched out in Time, and that the lop-sided view we had of it—a view with the 'future' part unaccountably missing, cut off from the growing 'past' part by a travelling 'present moment'—was due to a purely mentally imposed barrier which existed only when we were awake? So that, in reality, the associational network stretched, not merely this way and that way in Space, but also backwards and forwards in Time; and the dreamer's attention, following in natural, unhindered fashion the easiest pathway among the ramifications, would be continually crossing and recrossing that properly non-existent equator which we, waking, ruled quite arbitrarily athwart the whole.” J.W. Dunne in An Experiment With Time

This quote about dreaming is a wild one! J.W. Dunne was an aeronautical engineer who had a strange series of dreams about things that later happened. This led him to publish An Experiment With Time in 1927 which is a philosophical reverie on the concept of pre-cognition in dreams. I’m a sucker for anything vaguely philosophical that deals with the concept of time, so while this might be a little out there, it definitely makes for an interesting read. Dunne explores actual dreams, attempts to analyze whether the dreams contain any knowledge of the future, and provides a theory of time to try to explain why pre-cognitive dreams happen. This quote about dreaming from Dunne explains his theory that dreams allow us to see beyond the current moment in our timeline and in to our past and future.

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