Memoir · Transformation
Two to three hundred lines composed in sleep
Exmoor, Somerset, England · summer 1797
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines
Open this dream in the galaxy →
- Source
- The Complete Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, vol. 1 — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816 (preface). Preface to Kubla Khan
- Record type
- Memoir
- Place
- Exmoor, Somerset, England · British
- Date
- summer 1797
- Uncertainty
- Moderate — Coleridge’s own account (1816), written in the third person; the visitor “from Porlock” interrupted him.
- Imagery
- Palace · Garden · Writing · Book
- Feelings
- Wonder · Helplessness
How traditions have read this kind of dream
Psychological
Dreams of becoming someone or something else, or of not knowing whether one is awake, have long interested writers on lucid dreaming; Stevenson credited such night work with parts of Jekyll and Hyde.
Stevenson (1888)
Mythological
Metamorphosis is one of mythology’s oldest engines — Ovid’s Metamorphoses gathers hundreds of beings changed into trees, birds and stars.
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Chinese traditions
Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream gave Chinese thought the idea of wuhua, “the transformation of things”, and the phrase “Zhuang Zhou dreams of the butterfly” remains shorthand for the blurred line between self and world.
Zhuangzi, Qiwulun
These are cultural lenses, not a diagnosis.
Dreams that share its images
- A procession coming down the hill Yamato Province, Japan · 1904 (retold folk tale)
- Into the ants’ nest: the Hall of Watching Rain Xiayang, Shaanxi, China · undated (Jin collection)
- The kingdom under the locust tree Guangling (Yangzhou), China · c. 802
- Dreaming within a dream State of Song, China · c. 4th–3rd century BCE
- Carving the guardian out of the wood Tokyo, Japan · 1908
- The millet was not yet cooked Handan, China (story setting) · c. 780