The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Often attributed to Paul Valéry, this aphorism contrasts passive wishing with active effort. “Dreams” here are aspirations rather than sleep-fantasies; “to wake up” implies returning to the discipline of conscious life—attention, work, and practical decision-making. The line’s sting is that dreaming can become a substitute for doing: the pleasure of imagining success replaces the harder labor of pursuing it. Read this way, the quote functions as a modern moral maxim about agency: aspirations become real not through reverie but through alertness, responsibility, and sustained action in the waking world.