They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

This line is commonly attributed to Edgar Allan Poe and is generally traced to his short story “Eleonora” (first published in 1841). In that tale—one of Poe’s more lyrical, romantic pieces—the narrator reflects on memory, imagination, and the heightened perceptions that accompany intense feeling. The aphoristic sentence appears amid meditations on dreaming and waking consciousness, fitting Poe’s broader preoccupation with altered states (reverie, obsession, trance) as gateways to insight. It also aligns with the period’s Romantic-era valuation of imagination as a faculty that can disclose truths inaccessible to ordinary, “night-dream” passivity.

Poe contrasts passive dreaming (“only by night”) with deliberate, waking reverie (“dream by day”). The day-dreamer is “cognizant” of realities that elude those whose imagination operates only unconsciously in sleep: the cultivated visionary can notice patterns, emotional truths, or aesthetic possibilities that ordinary perception overlooks. The statement elevates imaginative attention as a form of knowledge—suggesting that creativity and insight arise when one consciously inhabits a dreamlike mode while awake. In Poe’s work, such heightened perception is double-edged: it can yield beauty and revelation, but it can also intensify fixation and blur the boundary between reality and inner fantasy.