"A Dream Within A Dream"--a wake-up call from Poe

"A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

~~~

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “A Dream within a Dream” features a speaker who struggles with the idea that the reality that we know may actually be unreal or significantly imagined. If, in fact, all that we experience is “a dream within a dream”, there is an implication that there is no true moment of ‘waking up’ to face reality; we are stuck forever in an illusory setting that is twice-imagined by our minds. This creates a very wide chasm in between what we believe to be real and what is actually real.

In the beginning of the poem, the speaker addresses an unnamed listener, to whom he agrees with in that his days have in fact been a dream. He kisses then leaves the listener with the central focus of the poem:  “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream” (Poe 10-11). In the second stanza, the speaker has moved to a different setting, one where he is surrounded by the loud crashing of waves beating against a “surf-tormented shore” (13). In his hands, he desperately attempts to hold onto the grains of sand he has collected from the shore, but the grains slowly fall between his fingers into the ocean. Seeing this, the speaker cries out in dismay, wondering why he is unable to hold onto the sand, and he ends the poem with the question “Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?” (23-24).

In the poem, I as the reader noticed a shift between the first and second stanzas. Where the first stanza has the speaker and his listener present in an unclear setting, the second stanza describes the speaker alone in a more concrete setting on the violent shore of a beach. However, the sentiments present in the first stanza seem to be mirrored in the second, on a more figurative level. The “hope” that leaves the speaker in the first stanza can be symbolized in the fleeting grains of sand that he desperately clings onto in the second; the bestial “surf” and “wave” that surrounds the speaker in the second stanza would then be symbolic of the same force that causes the hope to fly away in in the first. If reality is considered to be a conscious level, this shift to a more visual and physical setting could represent how the speaker departs from the innermost to the outside dream level located between the “dream within a dream” and reality—he has ‘awakened’ somewhat, but he still cannot see reality for it is. Understandably, this exasperates the speaker, who weeps at how he is still unable to have any control over what is happening, just as one cannot in a dream. The speaker is moved to ask the question now whether if all that once experiences is only a dream within a dream, and him asking a question rather than repeating his previous, similarly worded statement seems to show how he no longer wants to accepts this as a truth. The speaker wants to be able to be lucid and experience things for how they really are. I believe Poe thinks this is a shared human desire, from the way that the question is worded “Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?” (23-24). This opens up the question’s topic to more than just the speaker himself, and Poe asks the reader to consider the answer.