A Dream Within a Dream: Motifs

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Dreams versus Reality

Perhaps the key motif in the poem is the tension between dreams and reality. Throughout the poem, the speaker contemplates the notion that life is little more than a dream. Such a notion introduces the possibility that what we call “reality” may be less real than we think. If we take this line of thinking one step further, we end up in profound uncertainty. After all, if we can’t easily distinguish between dreams and reality, then how can we ever know for sure that reality “really” is? The speaker pushes this problem of distinguishing between dreams and reality to an extreme with the assertion that everything we know or think we know “Is but a dream within a dream” (line 11). Consider how this phrase differs from the more straightforward notion that life is but a dream. If life is but a dream, it means simply that life has a dreamlike quality. But if life is a dream within a dream, it means that the basic sense of reality has been so profoundly destabilized that everything must be questioned. It is this more radical sense of instability that causes the speaker such distress in the poem’s second stanza.

Waves

In the second stanza, when the speaker experiences an existential crisis on a beach, the violence of the waves contributes to their deepening distress. The speaker obliquely references waves in the opening lines of the second stanza, which establish the change of scene: “I stand amid the roar / Of a surf-tormented shore” (lines 12–13). Although they never mention waves explicitly, it is clearly the chaotic crashing of waves that generates the noisy “roar” and creates the sense of a “tormented” surf. The violence of the waves reflects the agitation of the speaker’s increasingly distraught mind. Near the end of the poem, however, the waves take on greater significance. At the height of their emotional turmoil, with beach sand slipping through their fingers, the speaker cries out: “O God! can I not save / One [grain] from the pitiless wave?” (lines 21–22). Here, the speaker voices a desire to save just one grain of sand from the violence of the surf. But this desire isn’t really about the sand. Instead, the speaker wants to protect themself from the turbulent vicissitudes of life. In this sense, “the pitiless wave” comes to symbolize life itself.