Life & Wisdom Quote by Thom Gunn

A boast, a dare, and a lie we tell ourselves to stay upright: "We control the content of our dreams". Coming from Thom Gunn, it lands less like New Age self-help than like a poet testing the tensile strength of will. Gunn spent his career writing under pressure - of desire, of discipline, of bodies that betray you, of a culture that polices what you’re allowed to want. So the line hums with a particular double meaning: dreams as nightly involuntary cinema, and dreams as the chosen ambitions that organize a life.

The intent feels aspirational but not naive. Gunn was famously formalist even when his subjects were transgressive; he believed in craft as a kind of ethics. Read that way, "control" points to technique: you can’t stop chaos from arriving, but you can shape its language. The subtext is a quiet argument against victimhood, especially the era’s medical and social narratives that framed gay men as doomed or disposable. To claim authorship over dreams is to resist being written by fear, addiction, panic, or public stigma.

But the phrase also flirts with its own impossibility. Actual dreams are where control goes to die; they’re the mind’s contraband. That tension is the point. Gunn’s line performs a modern contradiction: we preach agency while living in systems - biology, history, desire - that keep stealing the pen. The "we" matters, too: not solitary mastery but a collective insistence that imagination, at least, is a territory worth defending.