The Dream

            Many people depict dreams that seem so real they mistakenly felt as if they remained awake.  The Romantic poet, Lord Byron, illustrates a love story in his poem “The Dream”.  Byron wrote this poem in the summer of 1816; this was around the time Byron’s marriage with Annabella Milbanke could not survive any longer.  If Byron did not produce “The Dream” as a result from influence of his relationship with Annabella, then it exists as an actual summary of their love story.  In the first passage, Byron describes how dreams act, compares them to reality, and starts to transition into his dream of love for the second passage.  In passage two the poem reveals the feelings of deep love from a young boy, while the young girl does not share the same feelings.  Later on the boy grows into a young man, and discovers the young woman’s’ true feelings and flees.  He spends his nights alone in a house of his own, but he returns after the woman gets married.  She has children with this new man and feels happy, yet deep inside she feels hardship for something she cannot grasp.  The man marries another woman, but at the ceremony his mind wanders elsewhere.  In the conclusion they think of one another and live in madness or misery deep inside.

Byron believes a thin line acts as the difference between the world of dreams and reality as he says, “Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of reality” (D, I, lines 1-4).  In the first passage, Byron explains the similarities that dreams and reality hold, “And dreams in their development have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy” (D, I, lines 5-6).  What an individual dreams of can and most likely will be affected by what occurred in their life.  Dreams can carry powerful emotions, because of strong influences from reality.  Reality can influence the direction in a dream, and dreams can also influence an individuals’ life.  Dreams may influence an individual’s personality once they wake up, goals, or perspective in life.  Dreams influence an individual both positively and negatively as mentioned in the first passage, “They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off waking toils, They do divide our being; they become A portion of ourselves as of our time,” (D, I, lines 7-10).  Once in a while an individual may receive a visit from spirits.  Byron describes what these spirits have in store for an individual, “And they look like heralds of eternity; They pass like spirits of the past- they speak Like sibyls of the future; they have power- The tyranny of pleaser and pain; They make us what were not-what they will, And shake us with the vision that’s gone by” (D, I, lines 11-16).  I believe people shape their dreams, and dreams shape them.  There is truly a thin line between dreams and reality.  The matter of keeping it as a dream or changing it into a reality makes the difference.