The Power of Dreams

The Dream
Lord Byron

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 wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
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,
And 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 pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not -what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?
Creations of the mind? -The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep -for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.


Upon reading this stanza from Lord Byron’s poem:“The Dream", one comes across that enigmatic secret and unfathomable power of dreams. Lord Byron questions the nature of dreams : “The dread of vanished shadows-Are they so? Is not the past all shadow?-What are they? Creations of the mind.” So let’s try to answer Byron’s questions and shed the light on this excerpt from the standpoint of Sigmund Freud.

Byron starts his poem by saying that “our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world”. Life has two parts: The waking part and the dreaming part, and hence it is a mistake to regard the dreaming part as nonsensical. According to Byron they belong to “the wide realm of reality and dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.” On the other hand Freud emphasizes that dreams are the syntheses of a person’s life that represent his/her unconscious wishes and desires. Freud divides the dream work into two parts: the manifest content and the latent content. The manifest content is the content of the dream which is presented in our memory. The latent content is the dream thoughts. Thus, it is from the dream thoughts and not the manifest content that Freud draws from to “disentangle” the meaning of the dream. However, all the tears, tortures, and joys that Byron talked about are the dream content. They are expressed according to Freud “as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should be clearly led to error.” Also, Byron questions whether these pictorial images are” heralds”, “spirits”, or “sibyls”: “And look like heralds of eternity; they pass like spirits of the past-they speak like sibyls of the future”. Indeed, they are like highly condensed heralds and sibyls from our deepest unconscious, but once decoded and connected they can fill pages of interpretation, manifesting our deepest, innermost, and unconscious desires that shape our past, present, and future. Byron fully realizes the power of dreams: “They have power-the tyranny of pleasure and pain-what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by.”
This coincides with Freud who thinks that in dreams the most complicated and intellectual operations take place just like in the waking state. In a dream “statements are contradicted or confirmed, ridiculed or confirmed”. Moreover, Freud argues that the dream content does not resemble that of the dream thoughts because the dream distorts the dream wish which resides in the unconscious. Freud calls this process the “dream displacement” which acts like a self-censorship of the deeply buried repressed wishes, and this process is indispensable in dream interpretation.

We can end this discussion by saying that most of the the thoughts presented in Byron’s “The Dream” are thoroughly explored in Sigmund Freud’s concepts regarding the complex phenomenon of dreams and dream interpretation. According to Freud the dream content is like a picture puzzle that needs to be carefully put together in order to fully comprehend the enigmatic work of our unconscious. Dreams are an inseparable part of our being; just as Lord Byron conveys in his insightful poem: “They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time”. A dream is a “slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.”

Works Cited:

Byron, George Gordon. The Dream. 1816
Freud, Sigmund. From "The Interpretation of Dreams". Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. W. W. Norton&Company,Inc. 2010