Reading great authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mario Puzo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes influenced me as a writer. French writers like Gustave Flaubert, Victor Marie Hugo and Jean-Jacques Rousseau including Martinique-born writer Aime Cesaire only to name a few have also shaped me from the beginning as a school age child.

I remember the first time I read this poem “A Dream Within a Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe in my English class as an undergraduate.

A Dream Within a Dream
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

After I read this poem I paused for a long moment and I pondered upon the significance and the meaning of this poem. I couldn’t help but to think or question what we all seem to embrace as our own version of reality. And how this reality can be changeable from one day to the next based on our own individual perceptions.