Do you know the feeling you get when you are awakened in the middle of a dream? The dream story is still real and full of color, but the waking world is rushing back into your mind. And for a moment both worlds are true, and you cannot quite tell them apart.

There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing.

All the means we've been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we'd apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my lifefor our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

It’s not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, “Okay, world, today I’m gonna spaz.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.

So start with the waking state. When you are hungry eat, but always remember that it is the body that is hungry, not you. If you hurt your leg, wash and clean the wound, apply medication, but always remember that it is the body that is hurt, not you. This much remembrance – and you will find that ninety-nine percent of the pain has vanished. This slight knowledge, this little awareness removes so much of your suffering. One percent is bound to remain because the knowledge is not total. When knowledge becomes total all of the suffering disappears.Buddha said that an awakened person is beyond suffering. You can cut off the limbs of such a person, you can throw him in the fire, you can kill him, but you cannot make him suffer, because he stands apart from all that is happening around him.

I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook.