Living ‘The Dream’ (Poe style)

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All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

So asserts Edgar Allan Poe in his immortal poem, “A Dream Within A Dream” (1849). In an earlier post, we explored the allegorical structure of the poem. In this follow-up, I want to drive home the meaning of the phrase “A dream within a dream,” because it has a very precise meaning in Poe’s verse. It doesn’t just mean “a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!” (“JFK,” 1991.) That works well as a secondary meaning, as connotative reading of the phrase, but Poe has something more explicit in mind.
Specifically, Poe is saying that all that he pictures in his mind’s eye is a nostalgic vision (“dream” #1, which he “sees”), which is contained within the trancelike existence of his waking reality (“dream” #2, which is his life as it “seems”). Those two poles demarcate the boundaries of “All” his experience and the same is true, Poe boldly posits, for every one of us. All of our lives are waking trances, within which are contained these precious glimpses of things that move us inside, and of which we dream.
We can be sure of this construct because Poe develops it throughout other poems. For example, in “To One In Paradise” (1833), from sixteen years earlier, Poe also contrasts a trancelike waking existence with precious “nightly dreams:”

And all my days are trances, 
And all my nightly dreams 
Are where thy grey eye glances, 
And where thy footstep gleams
In the still earlier “Dreams” (1827), Poe compares his “young life” to “a lasting dream.” Here, he first posits that his entire life is dream-like: “that dream eternally/Continuing—as dreams have been to me.” And he also refers to his true dreams (i.e., while sleeping) as the repository of his departed happiness:

I have been happy, though in a dream. 
I have been happy—and I love the theme
Finally, in the simple and elegant “A Dream” (also 1827), Poe first fleshes out the sleeping dream/waking dream duality that culminates in the concise expression of the device in “A Dream Within A Dream:”

In visions of the dark night 
I have dreamed of joy departed— 
But a waking dream of life and light 
Hath left me broken-hearted.
The “visions of the dark night” are the “nightly dreams” where the poet remembers and encounters departed loved ones. These visions are contained within “a waking dream of life and light,” the reality where “all [his] days are trances.”
This construct of concentrically-contained ‘dreams’ is the duality that informs the entire premise of “A Dream Within A Dream” and therefore it is the key to unlocking the insights of the poem.

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