Sleep is supposed to comfort, nurture, and restore. Jackson’s poem takes place in a surreal dreamscape of “[m]ysterious shapes” (Line 1) that instead terrorizes helpless sleepers.

The poem describes how the painful memories that everyone struggles to suppress during the day come swirling out of the dark nothingness of sleep. In this forbidding and terrifying dream world, suffering and anxieties live again, making the sleeper’s heart race from fear. Memories come alive. Emotional pain becomes vivid and palpable. In exposing what is conventionally thought of us as a happy respite from the day’s labors, Jackson reminds readers of the terrifying vulnerability of sleep and the cruelty of dreams.

Although not as lurid or extravagantly vivid as the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, or as creepy and supernatural as the rustic tales of Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jackson’s sonnet abandons realism and the familiar real-time world to capture the harrowing realm of dreams. As such, Jackson’s sonnet is an expression of the wider 19th-century cultural fascination with the Gothic imagination. Gothicism as a mode focused on atmospheric terror, foreboding despair, and the oppressive weight of long-buried secrets.