To Sleep - Perhaps to Dream

It's 4 a.m. - I'm suddenly awake 3 hours ahead of schedule and using the time to catch up on people's blogs as well as my own. I love this bronze, "Time" by Brian Moneypenny depicting the constant flow of time through our hands.





There is something about time and thoughts that are magical - mystical. In a deeply spiritual way, we create ourselves and our lives through them. An energy, like the music of the soul, vibrates out from their joining, merging into the universe of all that is, and somehow becomes our reality. It is enough to take your breath away.

Today I am sharing some wonderful quotes about time. I am borrowing many of them from my friend Jasmine.

It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out the great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A "bad night" is not always a bad thing. ~Brian W. Aldiss

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
~D.H. Lawrence

The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late. ~Charles Caleb Colton

I wonder sometimes if I will kick and scream my way into the next life, crying "Oh, but God I have only yet begun to play in this one. I just discovered how the game works. There are so many more games I would love to play and learn. – Jasmine

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. – Andy Warhol

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. – Annie Dillard

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of. – Benjamin Franklin

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. – C.S. Lewis

Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations"

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. – Emily Dickinson

... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. – Paul Bowles

Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.
-Rumi

Time is free, but it’s priceless.
You can’t own it, but you can use it.
You can’t keep it, but you can spend it.
Once you’ve lost it, you never get it back.
- Harvy MacKay

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

And my 3 favorites:

There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast. ~Author Unknown

If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters. ~Author unknown, attributed to Jim Davis

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” – Albert Einstein