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Samuel Taylor ColeridgeAutumn 1797, Exmoor; told in 1816

Kubla Khan and the person from Porlock

A poet dreams two or three hundred lines, starts writing them down, and is interrupted by a visitor. The rest is lost forever, or so he said.

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The dream

Retold in our own words from the sources below, not quoted.

In the note printed with the poem, Coleridge says that in the summer of 1797, unwell and staying at a lonely farmhouse on Exmoor, he took a painkiller and fell asleep in his chair while reading a passage about the palace of Kublai Khan.

He slept for about three hours and was sure he had composed two or three hundred lines, the images rising before him effortlessly. On waking he began writing them down, but was called away by a person on business from Porlock. When he returned an hour later, all but a few scattered lines had vanished, like images on the surface of a stream when a stone is thrown in.

Where the story comes from

Kubla Khan was published in 1816, nearly twenty years later, with this note. An earlier handwritten copy, the Crewe manuscript, carries a shorter note of Coleridge's saying the fragment was composed in a sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium, in the autumn of 1797.

The "person from Porlock" has since become a byword for any interruption that destroys creative work.

How it has been read

Research

Opium affects sleep and dreaming, and Coleridge's own earlier note describes a reverie rather than a full dream. The feeling of having composed something vast and perfect in sleep, which cannot be recovered on waking, is also something many ordinary dreamers report.

Questions for your own dreams

  1. Have you ever been interrupted just as you were about to catch a dream?
  2. Do you tell the story of your own creative work differently years later?
  3. What would you guard more carefully if you knew it could vanish in an hour?

Symbols in this dream

Had a dream that stayed with you?

Tell us your dream

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

  1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816). Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep. London: John Murray.

    public domain

    • Cited at: prefatory note to Kubla Khan (reference not yet checked)

    The prefatory note to Kubla Khan tells the dream story.

  2. Antonio Zadra, Robert Stickgold (2021). When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep. New York: W. W. Norton.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: on memory for dreams (reference not yet checked)

    NEXTUP model: dreaming explores weak, unexpected associations between memories.

  3. Elisabeth Schneider (1953). Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    cited, not reproduced

    • Cited at: whole book (reference not yet checked)