“I am apt to think that the wisest men dream the most inconsistently. For as the judgment has nothing or very little to do in regulating the circumstances of a dream, it necessarily follows that the more powerful and creative the imagination is, the wilder it runs in that state of unrestrained invention; while those who are unable to wander out of the track of common thinking when awake, never exceed the boundaries of common nature when asleep.”
-Thomas Paine
Some say that dreams or nothing more than the random firings of neurons of a brain in the depths of sleep; others map out exact interpretations of a dream as if it were a common thing.
Dreams are neither random or common; they are a storehouse of imagination, a story-teller that we hear only in the quiet of the night. The stories they tell open a whole world that may, if we are listening, bring our waking life into sharper focus.
“To see it in our power to make a world happy – to teach mankind the art of being – to exhibit on the theater of the universe, a character hitherto unknown – and to have, as it were, a new creation entrusted to our hands, are honors that command reflection, and can neither be too highly estimated, nor too gratefully received.