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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Unreality of “Real” Life

Throughout “A Dream Within a Dream,” the speaker expresses a concern that real life is somehow less real than it should be. This concern first arises in the speaker’s address to their unnamed companion, in the poem’s opening lines. Just as they are parting ways from each other, the speaker acknowledges a point their companion has just made:

     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.

Here, in lines 1–5, the speaker admits that their life has felt like a dream. However, this fact doesn’t seem to perturb the speaker. Instead, they seem willing to accept the notion that real life has a quality of being unreal. The speaker’s feelings on this matter change dramatically in the second stanza. Alone now, the speaker has a more visceral and immediate sense of real life’s unreality. It is this experience that leads them to weep and call out to God, begging in vain for reassurance. With no divine response forthcoming, the speaker concludes rhetorically, asking, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” (lines 23–24). The speaker wants the answer to be “No,” even as they fear that the true answer may be “Yes,” which would confirm the fundamental unreality of “real” life.

The Ephemerality of Human Experience

Edgar Allan Poe wrote frequently about untimely death, which means that much of his work thematically centers on the brevity of life. In “A Dream Within a Dream,” however, Poe departs slightly from this basic theme. Instead of exploring the transitory nature of human life, he explores the ephemerality of human experience. This theme emerges most clearly in the poem’s second stanza, where the speaker stands on the shore and weeps as a handful of sand seeps through their fingers. The speaker feels particularly perturbed by their inability to grasp even a single grain, and they cry out to God in distress (lines 19–22):

     O God! can I not grasp
     Them with a tighter clasp?
     O God? can I not save
     One from the pitiless wave?

In this moment, the speaker clearly isn’t upset just about the sand. For them, the sand symbolizes the much more disturbing fact that their life is slipping through their fingers. Like the grains of sand, they have no sure way of holding on to any of their life experiences or saving them from “the pitiless wave” of forgetfulness. Life is quite simply passing them by, and their experiences disappear before their very eyes.

The Unstoppable Passage of Time

Just as the poem explores the ephemerality of experience, it also explores the closely related theme of time’s unstoppable passage. The speaker subtly introduces this theme in the first stanza, where they address their unnamed companion with a rhetorical question:

     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?

The basic point the speaker makes here in lines 6–9 is that it doesn’t matter how or when a person loses their sense of hope. Once they’ve lost it, it’s gone. The use of italics for the past-tense verb “gone” emphasizes the finality of the loss. That is, time can never be rewound to recuperate that loss; what’s gone is gone. The speaker returns to this theme in the second stanza, where they observe with distress how grains of sand slip through their fingers. The image of sand passing through the narrow crevices between fingers recalls a timekeeping device known as an hourglass, which measures time by having sand pass through a small aperture between two glass bulbs. As the sand empties from the top bulb into the bottom one, the hourglass provides a potent image of time running out.

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