The Beginning

How do we know a thing exists if we judge it only by waking standards? For the lucid dreamer, there is but a breath of separation between waking and sleeping, between consciousness and dreaming where ‘all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream’ – where the conscious doing of thinking and subconscious act of dreaming unite. This is the place I’m called to journey; to discover what is as true in dreams as we believe to be in real life, to discern a false awakening in real life as we experience in dreams; to grasp the teachings in a well-spun tale, the poet’s verse, the true confession.
(photo by Erin Cowherd Swemba)

A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe

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 grasp/Them with a tighter clasp?/O God! can I not save/One from the pitiless wave?/Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?