Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Reed

Dreams don’t just happen to us in Henry Reed’s line; they insist. “Seem to have a will of their own” turns the mind’s nightly theater into a rival agency, something with motives, timing, and a stubbornness that borders on the comic and the uncanny. Reed’s phrasing is crucial: “seem” keeps one foot in skepticism, the other in surrender. He’s not claiming metaphysics so much as capturing a familiar humiliation - the way the unconscious ignores our agendas, pulls up old faces, reruns embarrassments, invents disasters, hands us a revelation we can’t quite paraphrase at breakfast.

The intent feels less like romantic mysticism and more like a poet’s report from the front lines of attention. In wartime and postwar Britain - Reed’s adult landscape - the idea of inner life behaving autonomously carries extra charge. When public life is regimented by schedules, propaganda, and duty, the private mind becomes the one place that refuses to enlist. Dreams arrive as contraband: irrational, vivid, sometimes trivial, sometimes devastating. They expose what daylight discipline keeps polite.

Subtextually, Reed also flatters the imagination by stripping it of obedience. The creative mind, like the dreaming mind, doesn’t reliably show up on command; it ambushes you. Calling that ambush a “will” is a way to grant it dignity without pretending you control it. The line works because it makes a psychological truth feel like an encounter with another character - intimate, intrusive, and impossible to fully manage.