Daily Inspiration Quote by Frederick Henry Hedge

Dreaming gets treated as mental noise, but Hedge flips it into evidence: your mind is not a blank slate that occasionally misfires; it is a generator. The line is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it flatters the ordinary person with an extravagant premise: everyone carries a Shakespeare-grade creative engine. Underneath, it’s a gentle theological argument disguised as psychology. As a 19th-century clergyman with Transcendentalist sympathies, Hedge is pointing to an inner light - a divine or moral faculty - that leaks out most clearly when the usual social disciplines of waking life drop away.

The cunning part is the conditional: “if it were available in waking.” Dreaming becomes a proof of capacity and a critique of constraint. Why aren’t we all Dante? Because daylight imposes utility, propriety, and the small tyranny of self-consciousness. The unconscious writes with total license; the waking self edits for survival. Hedge’s romantic move is to treat that difference not as a fact of brain chemistry but as a lost civic and spiritual resource. Imagine what education, religion, and culture are doing, he implies, if the richest creative power most people experience is relegated to private, forgettable midnight theater.

Invoking Dante and Shakespeare is also strategic: they’re not just “creative,” they’re architects of moral worlds. Hedge isn’t praising dreams as escapism; he’s arguing that imagination is a serious faculty with ethical and cultural consequences - and that modern life trains it to sleepwalk.