The sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams

A nest-house is never young. Indeed, speaking as a pedant, we might say that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting. For not only do we come back to it, but we dream of coming back to it, the way a bird comes back to its nest, or a lamb to the fold. This sign of return marks an infinite number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years and, through the dream, combats all absence. An intimate component of faithful loyalty reacts upon the related images of nest and house.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 99

Through permanent childhood we maintain the poetry of the past

The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting.

[...]

The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.

[...]

It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 15-16

The house shelters daydreaming

If I were asked to name the main benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.6

It is only in consciousness that we experience time

It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself form the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 184

We manufacture realities

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the colour of our notions about what we do know: if we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread that we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

But that's how all of life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but also a table.We sit down at the table, not at the pinetree. Although love is a sexual instinct, we do not love with that instinct, rather we presuppose the existence of another feeling, and that presupposition is, effectively, another feeling.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 53

At the mercy of reality

Everything that one has created achieves reality. And soon the day dawns when one finds oneself at the mercy of the reality that one has created; and mourns the days when one's life was almost void of reality, almost a nullity; idle, inoffensive fancies spun round a knot in a roof. His eye had already, this first night, become a mourning eye.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 405

Between the wish and the thing

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses (Picador, 2010) p. 244

Det som gör hoppet till en så intensiv lustförnimmelse är att framtiden, som vi efter eget gottfinnande förfogar över, samtidigt uppenbarar sig för oss i en mångfald lika leende och lika möjliga former (une multitude de formes). Även om den starkast åtrådda av dessa förverkligas, måste vi ge upp de övriga och mister därmed mycket. Vår föreställning om framtiden, rik på oändliga möjligheter, är alltså mer fruktbar än framtiden själv. Härav kommer det sig att man finner mera tjusning i hoppet än besittningen, i drömmen än i verkligheten.

Henri Bergson, 'Tiden och den fria viljan' quoted on Intensifier, http://christopherkullenberg.se/?p=2661 (14/04/2013)

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. [...] It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) pp. 185-186