Life is a dream (when dreaming, with the night shall pass away)

“So sleep; sleep fast: and sleep away those two

Night-potions, and the waking dream between

Which dream thou must believe; and, if to see

Again, poor Segismund! that dream must be.

And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives,

Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,

How if our waking life, like that of sleep,

Be all a dream in that eternal life

To which we wake not till we sleep in death?

How if, I say, the senses we now trust

For date of sensible comparison,

Ay, ev’n the Reason’s self that dates with them,

Should be in essence or intensity

Hereafter so transcended, and awake

To a perceptive subtlety so keen

As to confess themselves befool’d before,

In all that now they will avouch for most?

One man–like this–but only so much longer

As life is longer than a summer’s day,

Believed himself a king upon his throne,

And play’d at hazard with his fellows’ lives,

Who cheaply dream’d away their lives to him.

The sailor dream’d of tossing on the flood:

The soldier of his laurels grown in blood:

The lover of the beauty that he knew

Must yet dissolve to dusty residue:

The merchant and the miser of his bags

Of finger’d gold; the beggar of his rags:

And all this stage of earth on which we seem

Such busy actors, and the parts we play’d,

Substantial as the shadow of a shade,

And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!

—

such a doubt

Confounds and clouds our mortal life about.

And, whether wake or dreaming, this I know,

How dream-wise human glories come and go;

Whose momentary tenure not to break,

Walking as one who knows he soon may wake,

So fairly carry the full cup, so well

Disorder’d insolence and passion quell,

That there be nothing after to upbraid

Dreamer or doer in the part he play’d,

Whether To-morrow’s dawn shall break the spell,

Or the Last Trumpet of the eternal Day,

When Dreaming with the Night shall pass away”

Life Is A Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca