David Mamet Dream Quotations

The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit. Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.

Freud believed that our dreams sometimes recapitulate a speech, a comment we've heard or something that we've read. I always had compositions in my dreams. They would be a joke, a piece of a novel, a witticism or a piece of dialogue from a play, and I would dream them. I would actually express them line by line in the dream. Sometimes after waking up I would remember a snatch or two and write them down. There's something in me that just wants to create dialogue.

The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.

The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.

The dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.