One of my favorite finds so far in Byron’s canon is his 1816 poem “The Dream”. It’s vivid and haunting, with beautiful use of repetition. It really feels like vicariously experiencing someone else’s dream.
Other things I’ve had a similar reaction to: the dream sequences in Borges’s short story “The secret miracle” (El milagro secreto, 1943), and the description of Ivanushka’s dream in the novella “The River” from Edward Rutherfurd’s episodic historical novel Russka (1991). Maybe a common thread is the way all of these make a point of calling attention to details shifting in strange and oddly specific ways that don’t immediately make waking sense, but seem significant somehow.
That Borges story also deals with a motif of time dilation in dreams, which is something Byron addresses in the first segment of his poem:
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.
Honorable mention to the Nightmare Song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe. It doesn’t haunt me in the same way as those other examples, but I’ve always thought it’s a remarkably realistic depiction of dreams at their most ridiculous and nonsensical. (And one of the best patter songs in the G&S canon.)
