This line comes from a private letter Lawrence wrote to his friend and literary mentor Edward Garnett in late January 1912, while convalescing from illness in Bournemouth, describing his own uneasy relationship with sleep and dreams. The exact wording is confirmed in that letter as first published in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence ↗ (1932).
“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams” I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams. — D. H. Lawrence, letter to Edward Garnett, 1912
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Provenance
The source
Work
Letter to Edward Garnett
Written
late January 1912, Bournemouth
First published
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (William Heinemann, 1932)
Scholarly edition
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I: September 1901–May 1913, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1979)
But at the bottom I am rather miserable. I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams. It is very queer. But my dreams make conclusions for me. They decide things finally. I dream a decision. Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer me them as dreams. It is a horrid feeling, not to be able to escape from one’s own — what? — self-daemon — fate, or something.
—from a letter to Edward Garnett, late January 1912
Spelling modernized from the 1932 printed text; the original manuscript letter is held among Lawrence’s correspondence.
Written in a private letter to his friend and literary mentor Edward Garnett ↗, who at the time was Lawrence’s editor and champion at the publisher Duckworth.
Lawrence wrote the letter from Compton House in Bournemouth, where he was convalescing after a serious illness in January 1912.
Although Lawrence wrote this letter in 1912, it remained unpublished private correspondence until 1932, two years after his death — so under U.S. rules for material first published in 1931 or later, the letter text is in-copyright rather than public domain.
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David Herbert Lawrence was an English writer whose novels explored industrialization, class, and sexuality with unusual candor for his era. He is best known for Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, and he was also a prolific letter-writer whose private correspondence is now studied as closely as his fiction.
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Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
Lawrence, D. H. Letter to Edward Garnett, late January 1912. In The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Aldous Huxley. London: William Heinemann, 1932.
MLA (9th ed.)
Lawrence, D. H. “Letter to Edward Garnett.” The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Aldous Huxley, William Heinemann, 1932.
APA (7th ed.)
Lawrence, D. H. (1932). Letter to Edward Garnett. In A. Huxley (Ed.), The letters of D. H. Lawrence. William Heinemann.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-can-never-decide-whether-my-dreams-are-the-result-of-my