The Dream Lord Byron Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own w… - Lord Byron

‎Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence. Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality; and dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy. They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, they take a weight off our waking toils. They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time, and look like heralds of eternity. They pass like spirits of the past — they speak like sibyls of the future; they have power — the tyranny of pleasure and of pain. They make us what we were not — what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by, the dread of vanished shadows — Are they so? Is not the past all shadow? — What are they? Creations of the mind? — The mind can make substances, and people planets of their own, with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. I would recall a vision which I dreamed, perchance in sleep — for in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.

XXII. By those, that deepest feel, is ill exprest The indistinctness of the suffering breast; Where thousand thoughts begin to end in one, 1810 Which seeks from all the refuge found in none; No words suffice the secret soul to show, For Truth denies all eloquence to Woe. On Conrad’s stricken soul Exhaustion prest, And Stupor almost lulled it into rest; So feeble now — his mother’s softness crept To those wild eyes, which like an infant’s wept: It was the very weakness of his brain, Which thus confessed without relieving pain. None saw his trickling tears — perchance, if seen, 1820 That useless flood of grief had never been: Nor long they flowed — he dried them to depart, In helpless — hopeless — brokenness of heart: The Sun goes forth, but Conrad’s day is dim: And the night cometh — ne’er to pass from him. There is no darkness like the cloud of mind, On Grief’s vain eye — the blindest of the blind! Which may not — dare not see — but turns aside To blackest shade — nor will endure a guide!

The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull;

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.