Success Quote by Edgar Allan Poe

Daydreaming gets treated like a soft vice: a drift from productivity, a symptom of boredom. Poe flips that moralism into a hierarchy of perception. The “dream by day” aren’t merely fantasists; they’re awake enough to notice what the well-adjusted miss. The subtext is a defense of the imaginative mind as a kind of heightened vigilance, an ability to hold two realities at once: the visible world and the one simmering underneath it.

Poe’s phrasing matters. “Cognizant” is chilly and exact, closer to forensic awareness than whimsy. Daydreaming here isn’t cotton-candy escapism; it’s consciousness with the lights on. Night dreamers, by contrast, are passive recipients of the brain’s private cinema. They get images, but not necessarily insight. The daydreamer chooses the frame, lingers, returns, rearranges. That active control is where “many things” live: buried fears, social hypocrisies, the half-glimpsed logic of desire. Poe implies that ordinary life is full of escapes - not from reality, but from noticing it.

Contextually, this fits a 19th-century writer who made interior experience his lab. Poe’s work is obsessed with altered attention: fixation, obsession, the mind watching itself unravel. Read against that, the quote becomes less inspirational and more unsettling. To dream by day is to volunteer for sensitivity, to accept that the world’s surfaces are inadequate. It’s a compliment, but also a warning: if you’re cognizant of what others can’t see, you may also be condemned to see it.