“The first few days I felt trapped in a constant twilight of vertigo, like in the dream where you're suddenly falling… only I was constantly falling. In moments of fitful sleep I was aware of the dim possibility that I would wake up, truly wake up, and this would not have happened.”

“Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”

“If I woke up tomorrow morning and it was just a dream, it would be the best dream I've ever had, and I would be ― I would not be happy to be waking up!”

“If only I could fall
sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!”

“I still dream of Orgonon.
I wake up crying.
You're making rain,
And you're just in reach,
When you and sleep escape me.”

“Part of me felt like something momentous was about to happen. The other part of me expected to wake up at any moment, to come out of this fever dream or stress episode or whatever it was and wake up with my face in a puddle of drool on the Smart Aid break room table and think, Well, that was strange, and then return to the boring old business of being me. But I didn't wake up.”

“Those perilous climbings [with her sister Claudia, in the Palo Duro Canyon, 1916] were frightening, but it was wonderful to me and not like anything I had known before. The fright of the day was still with me in the night and I would often dream that the foot of my bed rose straight up into the air — then just as it was to fall I would wake up. Many drawings came from days like that, and later some oil paintings.”

“Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born... All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price.”

“Only the weak will fall and give up, the strong falls 100 times and wakes up 200 times”

“That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.”