“Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?”

“When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.”

“Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?”

“When I am asleep, I dream what I dream when I am awake. It's a continuous dream.”

“I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.”

“I dream big because I believe I am what I think I am”

“O dream on your black wings
you come when I am sleeping.


Sweet is the god but still I am
in agony and far from my strength.


for I had hope (none now) to share
something of the blessed gods,


nor was I so foolish
as to scorn pleasant toys.


Now may I have
all these things.”

“Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.”

“My dream is all I have and all I am.”

“Now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account. […] I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder. Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself, or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.”