A Journey Into The Realm Of Dreams CONCLUSION LIFE IS ONLY A DREAM 'Again, no one is sure, apart from faith, whether he is awake or asleep, seeing that during sleep we believe that we are awake as firmly as we do when we are awake. We believe we see spaces, figures, movements; we experience the passage of time, we measure it; and in fact we behave just as we are awake. We spend half our life asleep, in which condition, as we ourselves admit, we have no idea of truth, whatever we imagine, since all our perceptions are illusory. Who knows, therefore, whether the other half of life, in which we believe ourselves awake, is not another dream, slightly different from the first from which we awake when we suppose ourselves asleep? 'If we dreamt in company and the dreams, as often happens, chanced to agree, and if we spent our waking hours in solitude, who doubts that in such a case we should believe matters reversed? Finally, as we often dream that we are dreaming, and thus add one dream to another, life itself is only a dream upon which other dreams are grafted and from which we awake at death, a dream during which we have as few principles of truth and goodness as during natural sleep, these different thoughts which disturb us being perhaps mere illusions, like the flight of time and the empty fancies of our dreams. From Pascal's Pensees-unfinished at his death in 1669.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; the voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn; the same that oft-times hath charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well as she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows, over the still stream, up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep in the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep? (John Keats, Ode to Psyche) © 1997 girlygirl_93@hotmail.com
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