Dreams

The experience of dreams in Poe’s poem represents an illusory living experience. After all, dreams are impermanent, ungraspable, imaginative cognitive experiences of the mind from which sleepers inevitably awaken and forget the experiences of the dream, no matter how sweet or horrifying. Poe seems to not care that the contents of his dream world may be pleasant while he is experiencing them – upon the “you” that he parts from in his dream, he bestows an affectionate “kiss upon the brow” (1). Rather, Poe fixates fatalistically on the inescapable “hope [that] has flown away” with the end of a dream (6). He repeats at the end of each stanza the refrain emphasizing the sensory impermanence of dreaming, which he equates completely with lived experience: “All that we see or seem / is but a dream within a dream” (10-12, 23-24). This cyclical repetition, essentially a forced confrontation, at the...