People think it's funny that I enjoy dreaming so much. I just use

“People think it’s funny that I enjoy dreaming so much. I just use it as a form of entertainment. It’s very private. I don’t see my dreams as separate. I mean, half the time I’m wandering around dreaming anyway.” — thus spoke Robert Smith, the poet of shadows and melodies, whose voice has long carried the ache of the heart and the mystery of the unseen. In these words, he opens a window into a soul that lives half in the waking world and half in the realm of dreams. What others may find strange, he finds sacred. For him, dreaming is not an escape from life, but an extension of it — the continuation of being, where imagination and existence intertwine like day and twilight.

To the ancients, the dream was never merely a phantom of sleep. It was a message from the divine, a reflection of the inner cosmos. The Egyptians called dreams “the whispers of the gods,” and the Greeks built temples where men could sleep and receive visions of healing. In every age, those who have lived close to wonder — poets, mystics, and artists — have understood that the mind does not rest when the body sleeps. It continues to wander, to create, to weave stories that mirror the soul. When Robert Smith says he does not see his dreams as separate, he speaks the truth of those ancients: that the world within is as real as the world without, and that the two are eternally intertwined.

His phrase “I just use it as a form of entertainment” carries a kind of humility, even humor — as if to say that what others chase through screens and distractions, he finds within the infinite theater of his own mind. But beneath this modesty lies something profound: the understanding that the inner life is the richest source of joy, creation, and renewal. The ancients knew that those who cultivate their inner garden need little from the outer world. For in dreams, the soul rehearses its desires, reconciles its fears, and touches the purest essence of imagination. To find entertainment there, as Smith does, is to find contentment not in noise, but in wonder.

When he says his dreams are “very private,” he honors the mystery that lies at the core of the dreaming self. The ancients, too, treated dreams with reverence — to speak of them carelessly was to expose one’s spirit. In the temples of Asclepius, dreamers would awaken and whisper their visions only to the priests, for dreams were not gossip but revelation. Smith’s privacy is not secrecy; it is respect. In a world that constantly demands exposure, he reminds us that not all beauty must be shared. Some parts of the soul must remain unspoken, protected by silence, like sacred music played for no audience but the stars.

“Half the time I’m wandering around dreaming anyway” — here, the poet confesses what many have forgotten: that the line between dream and waking is fragile. For those attuned to imagination, the daylight itself becomes a dream, filled with symbols, echoes, and soft impossibilities. The ancients would have called this state the poetic mind, the mind of the seer, the philosopher, the artist — one who sees what others overlook. Such souls do not merely live; they drift through life as through a painting, perceiving beauty even in sorrow, and meaning even in emptiness. To wander in waking dreams is not to flee reality but to enrich it — to see the hidden patterns that hold existence together.

Consider the ancient tale of Chuang Tzu, the Chinese sage who once dreamed he was a butterfly. Upon waking, he wondered if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man. His story endures because it reveals what Robert Smith too has glimpsed: that consciousness is a continuum, not a boundary. The dreamer and the waking self are not separate — they are reflections of the same eternal consciousness, forever shifting, forever one.

And so, from this reflection arises a lesson for all who walk through both light and shadow: do not fear your dreams, nor dismiss them as illusions. They are the purest expressions of your inner truth. Cultivate them as you would a garden, and they will bloom into wisdom and art. Let your imagination be your sanctuary, your source of quiet joy in a world too loud with certainty. Like Robert Smith, learn to live half in the waking world and half in the dreaming — to see no difference between the two, but rather, a harmony. For those who can wander and dream at once are the true poets of existence, the ones who remind humanity that reality itself is but a dream the universe keeps telling, over and over, in infinite forms of beauty.