Marcus Aurelius Quotes

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.

When you're dreaming, you don't know it's a dream. You might even interpret a dream in your dream - and then wake up and realize it was all a dream. Perhaps a great awakening will reveal this to be a dream as well.

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?

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.

No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

Knowing that you are living in a dreamworld is very liberating, because it gives you the option of waking up.

Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?

Beyond living and dreaming there is something more important: waking up.

A man, whilst he is dreaming, believes in his dream; he is undeceived only when he is awakened from his slumber.

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

Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

Keep your head on your shoulders - even when you think your head is on your shoulders, sometimes it isn't!

By meditation we try to slow down the mechanism of projections. If the mechanism is slowed down and even for a single moment you begin to be aware of the gap - imageless gap of the screen - you have the glimpse. Suddenly you know that you have lived in the dreams of your own creation; and whatsoever you have known as the world was not the world really, it was YOUR world.

Is a dream reality till you wake up?

If you want to stay in a state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

He who looks without, dreams; he who looks within, awakes.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.