And dreams in their development have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They have a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off our waking toils, They do divide our being.
Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
If I feel like crying, I'll just cry in a dream. Something I really try not to do in my waking hours. I like good melodrama because it's just an undumping of all these compulsions we feel that we work so hard to master during our waking hours. No wonder we crash to sleep in bed at night. We have to, otherwise we'd just spend our waking hours shredding the feelings from everybody else.
When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings. We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams.
But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared.
The world that we live in is full of distractions and pleasures that pull us away from a spiritual life. Even our jobs which are a very necessary and important part of our lives can end up being the altar at which we pray. They consume most of our waking hours and provide the income on which we are dependent in order to take care of our families.
An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.
Collect the power. Because our fear has power. And our fear is paralyzing, and our fear sets us off course. So it's about gathering and collecting that power, waking it up. And dedicating your life to honoring it.
We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.
We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth - our larger body - to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours , stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles.
And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives, Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake, How if our waking life, like that of sleep, Be all a dream in that eternal life To which we wake not till we sleep in death
Friendship is the allay of our sorrows, the ease of our passions, the discharge of our oppressions, the sanctuary to our calamities, the counselor of our doubts, the clarity of our minds.