I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange

When Tim Burton said, “I can’t remember any dreams in my life. There’s so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream,” he spoke with the voice of one who walks daily between worlds — the waking and the imagined, the ordinary and the surreal. His words shimmer with paradox: that while most people flee into dreams to escape the monotony of life, Burton finds in reality itself a tapestry so bizarre, so poetic, that it rivals the landscapes of sleep. He reminds us that the boundary between dream and waking is thinner than we believe, and that the truly creative soul is not one who dreams while asleep, but one who learns to dream while awake.

The origin of this quote lies in Burton’s lifelong fascination with the uncanny — with the beauty found in the grotesque, the tenderness found in the macabre. Born in Burbank, California, a place of sunlight and suburban order, he saw early on the strangeness hiding beneath the surface of normal life. His art, from Edward Scissorhands to The Nightmare Before Christmas, gives voice to that strangeness. In this light, his quote is not a confession of forgetfulness but a revelation of perception: he does not remember dreams because he never needs to — the dream is already here, unfolding in every crooked smile, every shadowed corner, every act of quiet oddity that most overlook.

In these words lies a profound truth about the nature of awareness. To most, life appears linear and mundane, confined by logic and routine. But Burton, like the mystics of old, sees that reality itself is a kind of dream, shaped not by fixed laws but by imagination and feeling. The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once told a parable of dreaming he was a butterfly, and upon waking, wondered: was he a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man? Burton’s view echoes this wisdom — that the strangeness of existence blurs the line between what is real and what is imagined. When we awaken to this, life becomes wondrous, mysterious, and endlessly alive.

Burton’s statement also carries an emotional undercurrent — a gentle lament about how others fail to see what he sees. Many wander through life numb to its peculiar miracles: the geometry of a leaf, the sadness in a smile, the poetry in decay. But those like Burton, who remain attuned to the strange, live in a perpetual state of wonder. What others call “weird,” he calls truth. To him, strangeness is not a flaw, but the soul of the world revealed. He invites us to embrace that strangeness, to find beauty not only in perfection but in the unexpected, the asymmetrical, the imperfect. For in the crookedness of life, he finds authenticity — and authenticity is always more profound than perfection.

Consider the painter Vincent van Gogh, who, like Burton, saw the ordinary world as charged with unseen emotion. To most, a field of wheat is just wheat. To van Gogh, it pulsed with light and madness, each brushstroke alive with trembling color. The world around him was so vivid that it overwhelmed him — life itself became dreamlike, both magnificent and terrifying. He did not need to sleep to dream; he simply opened his eyes. Burton’s sentiment mirrors this: that the artist’s curse and blessing is to see the dream embedded in the real, to live in a world where every moment hums with symbolic power.

But there is another layer to Burton’s wisdom: it is also a meditation on perspective. To those dulled by habit, life becomes flat — but to those who look deeply, life regains its strangeness. The strange is not something to fear, but something to understand. Burton’s films, his art, his very way of speaking, remind us that the peculiar and the profound often share the same face. To say that “real life often seems like a dream” is to say that the world is not fixed, but fluid — that meaning and mystery are born from how we choose to see. The greatest prison is not reality, but the refusal to marvel at it.

So, my child, take this teaching into your heart: open your eyes as if you were dreaming. Do not rush through your days as though they were mere tasks to be conquered. Look closer — at the flicker of light on a windowpane, at the strange beauty of faces in a crowd, at the moments of silence that tremble with unsaid emotion. Embrace the strange, for it is the signature of life itself. As Tim Burton teaches, the true artist — the true human — does not wait for dreams to come in the night. They live their dreams in the daylight, finding in the mystery of the ordinary the wonder that others have forgotten. And when you can do that, the world itself becomes your masterpiece — half dream, half waking, wholly alive.