I see a picture by the lamp's flicker...
Isn't it strange how dreams fade and shimmer?

Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous.

The more you try to describe a dream the further it eludes your grasp, retreating before the advance of the words, growing cooler and cooler and paler and paler, until, when you have recorded it all, there is nothing of what it was really like left in your memory.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal — the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins.

When twilight fades, you can see the stars. When dawn fades, all that’s left is…” “All that’s left is the harsh light of reality.

The strange amber twilight I’d lived with was gone, and in its place was some terrible new brightness. I’d gone from feeling lost in a dream to lost in wakefulness, as if I might never sleep again.

Like those who see so clearly while they dream that marks of feeling, when their dreaming ends, remain, though nothing more returns to mind, so I am now. For nearly all I saw has gone, even if, still, within my heart, there drops the sweetness that was born from that.

You often say, 'I have had a strange dream, a frightful dream, without any likeness to reality' You are mistaken in thinking it to be so; for it is often a reminiscence of places and things which you have seen in the past, or a foresight of those which you will see in another existence, or in this one at some future time. The body being torpid, the spirit tries to break his chain, and seeks, in the past or in the future, for the means of doing so.

Dreams turn to dust in light of day.

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.

[. . .] radiant dreams are passing in the night,
the memories throb with sorrow, joy with pain . . .
it is pain to dream and see desires
slip through the arms,
a vision lost for ever
winging down the moving drifts of sleep.

In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed — But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me
broken-hearted.

This feeling of not belonging to the same sensation which grips you in a dream, you find yourself walking through an unfamiliar district. On waking you realize, little by little, that the pattern of its streets had overlaid with the one with which, in day time, you are familiar.