Lau Brian English 200 D Andrew McNair 4-02-88 Reading Response #2 After reading the poems "The Pains of Sleep" and "Dreams and Sleep" I have concluded that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a man who fears nightmares. Everybody fears nightmares, but to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he seems to have some pretty intense nightmares. He has nightmares that cause him to wake up screaming and afterwards, crying. With similar experiences, I can recall that when I was around five to ten years old, I used to have some strange nightmares that would wake me up in the middle of the night gasping for breath. It was strange because after these nightmares, I would just sit on my bed and maybe my eyes were open or not, but all I could think about was finding out why I had dreamed what I had dreamed. It had occupied every bit of consciousness. Then about a year ago, I had a similar experience, except I was not sleeping. I was driving home from a loss at a basketball game and I was pretty mad that my team had lost. I was so mad that in my head, I was playing flashbacks in my head. The flashbacks were so lively and vivid that I had forgotten I was still driving. Needless to say, it was pretty dangerous and luckily my tires collided with a low median and I was able to quickly recover. But through all this, I think I have discovered nightmares will occur when people seem to have experienced an extreme intense negative emotion. In "The Pains of Sleep", I cannot really relate to because I don't have nightmares anymore. The author, I am assuming is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seems to have something haunting him. In line 43-44, it says "Such punishments, I said, were due to natures deepliest stain'd with sin:" He believes that these nightmares are punishment for all the sins he has committed. This poem contrasts with the poem last that we read. In Sonnet 39, Shakespeare
speaks of how sleep is a comfort to him; how sleep will let him dream about the thing he desires most; how dream will cast away all his worries and pains. From what I can interpret about lines 1-10 in "The Pains of Sleep", Samuel Taylor Coleridge prays by lying lifelessly on his bed. He doesn't move his lips or does he bends his knees. It's strange, but I guess that when he does not subject his body into any type of action, that is when he can concentrate most. In line 35-36, it states "Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me Distemper's worst calamity." He says this because to him, sleeping gives him nightmares when it gives everybody else dreams. In "Dreams and Sleep", the last stanza with notebook entry January 1811, Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes nightmare as a psychological/subconscious sense. He is trying to determine what the true meaning of sleep is. In short, he says nightmares is a kind of Reverie during which the Understanding and Moral Sense are awake. The way these dreams compare to the previous dreams we've read about is that these dreams are more detailed and do not seem to be frightening. I believe Coleridge's attitude towards his dreams is similar to those of Sigmund Freud. Freud believed dreams were some sort of revealing the unconscious; the idea where dreams reveal thoughts that are suppressed and not acceptable to the norms of the culture. This is apparent in his poem "Dreams and Sleep" when he says Reason is disturbed and understanding and moral senses are confused. I think Coleridge brings Reason into play because similar to the Freudian theory, Coleridge says reason is suspended in sleep in the footnote. And also it seems to him that sleep is a reflection of the truth that he tries to hide in his life.