Haruki Murakami Quotes

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

Is a dream reality till you wake up?

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

The part of my brain that was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.

No," says Ariana. "It was a dream. Reality got in the way, that's all.

Dreams are imperfections of sleep; even so is consciousness the imperfection of waking. Dreams are impurities in the circulation of the blood; even so it's consciousness a disorder of life. Dreams are without proportion, without good sense, without truth; so also is consciousness. Awake from dream, the truth is known: awake from waking. The truth is: The Unknown

Reality itself is too twisted.

I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better - time, consciousness and the dream-like basis of reality.

When we're awake, we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what is really there.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

Time and space are just projections of your consciousness.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.