D is for Dream

Day 4.  Today you get another poem!  Last poem for a while.

What I love about this poem by Edgar Allan Poe is that it questions the very nature of reality.  It expands that few second haze between the sleeping and waking states, where dreams continue to echo in our minds, and pushes it to encompass our entire lives.  What is real?   And for those who may not be interested in questioning  reality, Poe brings in the concept of time. All we can do, is watch time pass.  Once this very moment is gone, we live in the dream-like quality of our memories.   This masterful blending of consciousness and time makes me aware that indeed we are not masters of our fate, we are simple beings in the cosmic slipstream, watching grains of sand slip through our hands.

A Dream Within A Dream

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 save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe