"Dreams must be heeded and accepted. For a great many of them come true"
About this Quote
Dreams are not distractions to be dismissed but signals to be read. The line urges a posture of receptivity: heed and accept, rather than control or ignore. For Paracelsus, a 16th-century physician-alchemist who fused observation with hermetic thought, dreams belonged to the same web of correspondences that linked the human body to the cosmos. The sleeper is a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm; nocturnal images can register physical imbalances, psychic conflicts, or astral influences. To accept them is to grant that meaning can arrive in symbolic form, carrying knowledge reason alone might miss.
The claim that many dreams come true has a double edge. On one level, Paracelsus took seriously the possibility of prefiguration and diagnosis: a dream might foreshadow an illness or disclose a remedy, because nature speaks in signs. On another level, he understood imagination as an active force that shapes reality. What the mind holds with intensity can impress itself upon the body and the world; desire and fear can summon their own confirmations. In this sense, dreams become true not only by prediction but by participation. They orient attention, animate will, and enlist chance to fulfill their designs.
Set against the Renaissance struggle to break free of scholastic authority, the statement is also a defense of experience. Paracelsus burned canonical texts and lectured in the vernacular, insisting that nature, not tradition, is the book to be read. Dreams are one of its chapters. To heed them is to practice a broader empiricism, one that listens to the covert as well as the overt.
Modern psychology and neuroscience, though stripped of Paracelsian cosmology, echo the practical wisdom here. Dreams can consolidate memory, surface latent problems, and seed creative solutions; aspirations galvanize behavior and become self-fulfilling. Acceptance does not require literalism or credulity. It asks for attention and discernment, recognizing that what stirs in the dark often governs what happens in the light.
The claim that many dreams come true has a double edge. On one level, Paracelsus took seriously the possibility of prefiguration and diagnosis: a dream might foreshadow an illness or disclose a remedy, because nature speaks in signs. On another level, he understood imagination as an active force that shapes reality. What the mind holds with intensity can impress itself upon the body and the world; desire and fear can summon their own confirmations. In this sense, dreams become true not only by prediction but by participation. They orient attention, animate will, and enlist chance to fulfill their designs.
Set against the Renaissance struggle to break free of scholastic authority, the statement is also a defense of experience. Paracelsus burned canonical texts and lectured in the vernacular, insisting that nature, not tradition, is the book to be read. Dreams are one of its chapters. To heed them is to practice a broader empiricism, one that listens to the covert as well as the overt.
Modern psychology and neuroscience, though stripped of Paracelsian cosmology, echo the practical wisdom here. Dreams can consolidate memory, surface latent problems, and seed creative solutions; aspirations galvanize behavior and become self-fulfilling. Acceptance does not require literalism or credulity. It asks for attention and discernment, recognizing that what stirs in the dark often governs what happens in the light.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Paracelsus
Add to List
