Poe's American Dream

Time, Reality, and Dreams:

A Tapestry of Blurred Elements

Life, as it were, can be mundane or adventure filled. From day to day, week-to-week, month-to-month, and year to year, life is full of vicissitudes. In the grand scheme of things, though, is it not also possible that what each of us experiences in every second of life nothing more than one long vivid and profound dream? Edgar Allen Poe captures this precise sentiment in his short poem, A Dream Within A Dream, in that everything that is stated as an experienced in time is supplanted as merely one long and detailed dream and that each and every experience in life is finite and fleeting; it is here one minute and then gone in the next. He achieves this surreal idea of life as a dream within a dream in

In the first stanza of the poem, a reference to time passing is evident and indicates that the passage of time is an immutable force. Contained within this stanza, Poe wrote “[i]n a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone?” This was a profound and definitive reference to the march of time because the progress of night and day is a linear concept of time that we all experience and we concede control over our lives without thinking about it. In the form of a question though, while these lines recognize the passage of time, they also blur the line between reality and dreams, in that just because experiences, real or perceived, has passed, is it any less real and thusly, is life itself nothing more than a dream? Poe answered this in the final lines of the first stanza when he wrote. “All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.” These lines provided a definitive answer to the posed question, in that there exists a possibility that all we are and all we experience is nothing more one unending