M. Alice LeGrow

Meet Dinah, a disturbed young girl who has been sent to the small town of Bizenghast to live with her aunt following the tragic death of her parents. Dinah thinks her aunt's house is haunted, but her aunt thinks she has some sort of mental illness. Dinah sneaks out with her only friend, Vincent, and together they discover a lost graveyard where Dinah reads from a stone engraving. This act binds her to a contract requiring Dinah to release spirits stuck somewhere between life and the afterlife. So Dinah begins her quest of "cleaning" the vaults, crypts and graves of lost souls, while struggling with the haunts at home and suspicions of her growing mental illness.

Bizenghast manga volume 1

Erica England 

Are we merely thinking of things that have happened to us while we were awake?

Is a dream no more than the assemblage of random memories, information and desires, collected and reordered in strange and unnatural ways?

Is it the mind's way of sorting itself out, of decompressing after a long day of work?

Can we ever say for certain where dreams come from, or what meaning they may hold...if any? They can seem like gateways to fantastic worlds, or pits that we stumble down on our descent into nightmare.

When we dream of falling, are we falling emotionally? Is it a symbol of the sense we get during our waking life...of losing control over our destinies?

Are we falling in our dreams because that is how the mind feels? Or are we falling because it's a sensation, something to randomly dream about during a night of long, random and meaningless experiences?

Can dreams warn us of the future? Are they sometimes speaking to us through a language of symbols?

Unable to translate, do we just take their symbolism at face value, and assign it to something that has happened or is happening? Or could these symbols be telling us of something that has yet to happen?

Some people believe in prophetic dreams. Some people do not.

Dreams are persistently unstable, and unpredictable. Attempts to test so-called prophetic dreams are destined for failure.

But sometimes, there is a feeling we get, even after we've woken up from a dream.

And when that dream comes true in life, we say, "I've been here before, but I don't remember why. . 

There's no telling when you might have a significant dream. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you'll have strange, yet purposeless ones.

But then, there will be that thousandth dream. The one that will stay with you for days. 

It's trying to tell you something, but you're not listening.

Maybe you fell in life, and that's why you fell in your dream. Or maybe you're going to fall. And you'll never know if you could have prevented it by listening to your dreams. Because no one ever listens to dreams. They just look up one day and say to themselves, "I've been here before."

Bizenghast manga volume 1 quotes

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