Dream is not that which you see while sleeping; it is something that does not let you sleep.

This line is one of the most reproduced sayings credited to A. P. J. Abdul Kalam in Indian educational and motivational settings, and the sentiment squares perfectly with his lifelong emphasis on dreams, ambition, and youthful aspiration. We searched his major works — including Wings of Fire, Ignited Minds, and India 2020 — along with transcripts of his public addresses and interviews, and could not tie this exact sentence to any specific page, chapter, or dated speech. Full-text checks of several of his books turned up no verbatim match, though we treat that as inconclusive rather than negative, given the real coverage gaps around speeches, translated editions, and non-digitized material. The phrase does appear in numerous recently published third-party books (dated 2023 through 2026) that attribute it to Kalam, but these are secondary compilations that echo the popular attribution rather than trace it to his own hand or voice. Importantly, we found no credible competing claimant and no documented earlier instance pointing to another author, so there are no grounds to call this misattributed or disputed — the issue is simply the absence of a located primary source. On the evidence available, we are marking this quotation as attributed.