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.