Cuz you're scared, I ain't there?
Daddy's with you in your prayers
No more crying, wipe them tears
Daddy's here, no more nightmares.
— Did you ever read about the Balinese way of dreaming? They got this whole system they call dream skills. So if you have a nightmare, for instance, like falling. Right. Well, instead of screaming and getting all nuts... you say, «I'm going to make up my mind... that I fall into a magic world». Make it something special like a poem or a song. They get all their art and literature from dreams. Just wake up and write it down.
— Dream skills. What if they meet a monster in their dreams?
— They turn their back on it. Take away its energy, and it disappears.
— But what happens if they don't do that?
— Then I guess those people don't wake up to tell what happens.
I honestly believed that as long as you kept chasing your dreams, someday they had to come true. But to do that, you can’t take your eyes off of your dream, not even for a second. Even if sometimes it’s a bad dream... Whether you’re awake, whether you’re asleep... To make your dream a reality, you have to keep your gaze fixed on it no matter what.
— They gave us the worst job, Tommy.
— Yeah... and we're fucking volunteered. Sometimes, it lasts all night. I lie here and I listen to the shovels and the picks against that wall there. And I pray the sun will come up at the curtains before they break through. "No, I don't pray — I hope. And sometimes, it happens. The sun beats them. But mostly... the shovels beat the sun."
Explanation:
Thomas constantly sees the nightmare he experienced in the war.
— What about the... Well, you know. Are they gone?
— No, they're not gone. And maybe they never will be. But I've gotten used to ignoring them, and I think they've given up on me. You think that's what it's like with all our dreams and our nightmares, Martin? You've got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive?
— John, they haunt you though.
— They're my past, Martin. Everybody is haunted by their past.
I know already what will happen: somebody'll drag me out of the fog and we'll be back on the ward and there won't be a sign of what went on tonight and if I was fool enough to try and tell anybody about it they'd say, Idiot, you just had a nightmare; things as crazy as a big machine room down in the bowels of a dam where people get cut up by robot workers don't exist. But if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?