Explore "The Dream" by Lord Byron on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I / 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.