“A Dream Within a Dream” By Edgar Allan Poe. 

If there’s one word I would use to describe myself over the course of my entire life, it would be “outsider.” An introvert to the core and quiet to a fault, I have always found myself watching conversations and human interaction from afar, as if on a television screen, or in a dream — a dream within a dream. 

Life goes by fast, too fast for most people to make any lasting difference in the world. Poe despairs about this very thing in “A Dream Within a Dream,” in which he wonders if life is just a dream. He views love and hope as a dream, when he loses these things, it’s akin to waking up. However, he finds that upon waking up from this secondary dream, reality is just as much a dream. He isn’t wrong — how can we be certain anything is real? All of our senses, the things we feel, see and experience, are just electrical signals in the squishy mass of our brains. 

In the second stanza of the poem, Poe is standing on the beach, holding sand in his hands. He realizes that the more he tries to hold on to the sand, the more it slips through his fingers. This is exactly what it’s like to try to hold on to parts of your life that don’t exist anymore. When you do this, more and more of your life will slip past you.

I admit, I get stuck in my head a lot thinking about the past. I have obsessive compulsive disorder; ruminating about the past is something of an Olympic sport for me. If I don’t make the conscious effort to stop thinking so much about the past, holding on to things that happened a long time ago, reliving them, I will get stuck there and miss what’s going on right in front of me. Yes, I watch life go by in a dream, but I want to be present in the dream, not trying to recount the ones I had in the past that I can’t change now.

It seems like Poe is also an expert on reliving the past. In fact, “A Dream Within a Dream” is a revision of a poem he wrote previously, “Imitation.” I will say that revisiting the past in this way was a good thing — I like “A Dream Within a Dream” much more than its predecessor. Breaking it up into two stanzas made it much stronger, with two individual ideas: realizing life is a dream within a dream, and holding on to the past as it slips away from you. It also instills the poem with a natural turning point, where the tone shifts from curiosity and potential hope to despair.

This poem gives words to the desperation of watching the world turn and people living their lives all around you. As he stands on the shore, he notes how it roars. There are so many things going on around him, the waves coming and going like life, taking the past — the sand — from his hands as it slips through his fingers, and all he can focus on is saving the sand, just one particle from being swept away by the tide. 

I don’t mean to give advice to a man much more renowned and undoubtedly wiser than myself, but if I could tell Poe anything, it would be to not let life pass by watching from the outside, people flitting around you like characters in a stage play around black-clad staff members. Let the ocean waves wash the sand off your hands. Embrace life, embrace the hard parts, embrace the love you lose, embrace the inevitable. Embrace the dream.

sand running through a person’s hands on the beach