Other People's Dreams

There is a line from the latest Bob Dylan disc Modern Times that makes me recall a quote which I cannot quite find the correct attribution for:

There is nothing more boring than other people’s dreams.

I have searched for this online and have come close, and have even see it “sort of” attributed to Mark Twain, but when you read the fine print, it is not clear he is the one who said it first.

On the newsgroup Alt.Quotations a contributor generously found this:

Other people's dreams are about as universally interesting as accounts
of other people's gardens, or chickens, or children.
~ H.H. Munro(Saki)1870-1916, A Bread And Butter Miss

Which certainly conveys the meaning.

And I have seen this:

"Other People's Dreams aren't very interesting, usually"

Kurt Vonnegut, from Slaughterhouse 5

And finally, the ill attributed quote here:

so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness; "a boring evening with uninteresting people"; "the deadening effect of some routine tasks"; "a dull play"; "his competent but dull performance"; "a ho-hum speaker who couldn't capture their attention"; "what an irksome task the writing of long letters is"- Edmund Burke; "tedious days on the train";
"the tiresome chirping of a cricket"- Mark Twain; "other people's dreams are dreadfully wearisome"

look at the positioning of the semi-colon. Not Twain, but there is never an attribution after that last quotation mark.

In any case, the quote made me think of a couple of things.

First, does the author mean that other people’s aspirations are boring, or other people recounting their night time hallucinations?

I would disagree if it were the former, as other people’s goals and aspirations tell a lot about them as individuals.

If it were the later, I would say a qualified yes. If you are a subject of this other person’s dream, that is always interesting. If this other person is important to you, then their subconscious is also important to you and should be ignored at your peril.

The second thing this made me thing of was another quote (this one from Proust when writing about Venice):

“And as there is no great difference between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality…”

Cogito ergo sum, indeed.

In any event, the original verse which spawned this rambling post was from the song Thunder on the Mountain and is:

Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes
I'll say this, I don't give a damn about your dreams