George Byron - The Dream

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed

And a wide realm of wild reality,
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,

And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
And dreams in their development have breath,
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,

A portion of ourselves as of our time,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
And look like heralds of eternity;

They make us what we were not—what they will,
They pass like spirits of the past—they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power— 
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
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?
Substances, and people planets of its own

Perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought,
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
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,

And curdles a long life into one hour.