Life & Wisdom Quote by Susan Sontag

Sontag flips the usual Freudian traffic pattern. Instead of treating dreams as a backstage pass to the “real” self, she insists on the primacy of lived experience: the day is not a footnote to the night. It’s a characteristically Sontagian move, suspicious of any system that claims to decode you more accurately than you can build yourself.

The line carries a quiet polemic against interpretation as a lifestyle. In her essays, Sontag repeatedly bristled at critics who approach art like a locked room and meaning like the key. Here, that skepticism is turned inward. Dream-interpretation stands in for any ready-made hermeneutics - psychoanalysis, ideology, even the reflex to narrativize personal experience into a neat allegory. She’s not denying that dreams matter; she’s denying their authority.

The subtext is ambition, almost aesthetic ambition: let life be the instrument that gives dreams their pitch. Dreams become raw material, not prophecy. What matters is what you do after waking - the choices, habits, risks, and contexts that make a dream legible. That emphasis lands in the late-20th-century intellectual climate Sontag inhabited, when psychoanalysis still shaped culture but its explanatory swagger was increasingly contested.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it’s symmetrical and combative without sounding like a manifesto. Two clauses, a single pivot (“but rather”), and the reversal does the heavy lifting. It’s an ethic of agency disguised as a meditation: stop outsourcing your meaning. Build a life that can bear the weight of your fantasies.