Our Truest Life
Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
~ Henry David Thoreau, United States writer and social critic (1817–1862).
Thoreau discovered the poetic significance of the unconscious in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. There he observed that “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.…[I]n dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived.” Dreams — plus visions, trances, hallucinations, somnambulist experiences, and liminal states — animated the best of this period’s literature. — The Observer by John Summers, New Republic, April 20, 2010.
Our dreams stand for our goals. So when we are awake and living our dream, we are successful. So, when we are consciously living our dreams, we are truly living. When we truly realize what we want, find it, and consciously live it, we find our truest life and are awake in our dreams!
Dreams here mean our aspirations, objectives in life, and the greatest life would be the one when the goals, wishes, and dreams are fulfilled. That is how I would interpret the meaning of living our truest life by being awake in our dreams.
