Life & Wisdom Quote by Anais Nin

Anais Nin is making a demand that sounds gentle until you notice how radical it is: stop treating dreams as decorative, private theater and start treating them as raw material for a lived life. Coming from a writer whose diaries turned inner weather into literary event, the line carries a clear intent: defend the unconscious as something practical, not merely poetic. She isn’t romanticizing sleep; she’s arguing for integration.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Composed greatly” tilts the balance of authority away from the rational self we like to credit for our decisions. Nin implies that what we call “choice” is already saturated with fantasy, desire, fear, memory - forces that operate whether or not we acknowledge them. That’s the subtext: ignoring the unconscious doesn’t make you freer; it just makes your motivations less legible. The modern ego’s obsession with control becomes, in her view, a kind of naïveté.

Then comes the imperative: those dream-elements “must be brought into connection with action.” Not indulged, not analyzed to death, but connected - translated into behavior, art, relationships, risk. The final metaphor, “woven together,” rejects a clean hierarchy where reason rules and the irrational is an embarrassment. Weaving suggests craft: ongoing, tactile, imperfect, requiring attention. It’s also a rebuke to compartmentalization, the common cultural habit of treating inner life as a weekend hobby and action as weekday performance.

Context matters: Nin writes in a 20th-century moment steeped in Freud, Surrealism, and women pushing against prescribed identities. Her call isn’t escapism; it’s a strategy for authorship of the self.