I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables

Susan Boyle brought me here from Christchurch, New Zealand.



Dreams and childhood fantasies are an essential part of our lives. They let our imaginations roam free and fill us with wonder. Often, we hope or believe that life would be like our dreams. But how would we feel if we lived to experience that our dreams shall always be just the dreams? The beautiful but sad song “I Dreamed a Dream” thoroughly explores this idea.

The introductory stanza of the song is a summary of what is to come. A cheerful tone is created by the use of positive words such as “kind”, “soft”, “inviting” and “exciting”. However, the repetition of “there was a time” implies that the nice things may not last forever, which is confirmed by the last line: “Then it all went wrong.” The style of the song resembles a Petrarchan Sonnet in that the mood shifts part way through the it. It can thus be separated into two main sections composing of the first two stanzas (after the introductory one) and the final four stanzas.

From the very beginning we are told to keep in mind that the good dreams happened in the “times gone by”. This evokes a sense of nostalgia which permeates throughtout the song. The repetition of “I dreamed” emphasises the dreams that we had and the value we placed on them. The song is optimistic at the start as “hope was high” and we dreamed that “love would never die” and “God would be forgiving”. These certainly reflect our hopes as a child and even through most of our lives. These are the things we all dreamed of.

The next stanza explores the naivete of the “young”. We were “unafraid” not because we were brave, but because we had no idea of the dangers that exist. We didn’t have life’s experience on our side. The song asserts that our “dreams” are ephemeral as they just come and go and are “wasted”. Since “ransom” implies kidnapping, “no ransom” signifies the idea of being “unafraid”. The next two lines “No song unsung/ No wine untasted” conveys a carefree atmosphere of youth.

In the following stanza, the mood shifts. Before, it was cheerful and bright like a sunny day, reflecting the brightness of youth. Now, however, “night” comes and the beast, “the tiger”, prowls. “Night” symbolises the unknown and the unseen. “The tiger” represents the unknown danger lurking in the dark that is the life after childhood. Roosevelt once famously declared “There is nothing to fear but fear itself”. During youth we knew nothing so had nothing to fear. Once we grow up we realise there is so much out there that we do not know. We come to see the the great expanse of the unknown and that is what we fear. The contradicting simile “their voices soft as thunder” suggests the deceptive nature of our childhood dreams. We hoped that we could live our dreams, but we did not foresee the danger of resting our hopes and lives on the dreams we dreamed. And so “the tigers” come to “tear [the unsuspecting’s] hope apart”. The song began with high hopes but now life has ferociously torn that hope apart and taught us the “shame” of not seeing life as it really is.

The idea of love returns in the ensuing stanza. It starts off in a cheerful mood in where “He slept a summer by my side/ He filled my days with endless wonder.” However, the fact that he stayed for only one summer foreshadows the end of this fleeting love. Innocently, the singer thought that the man played his part in her childhood fantasies because he “took [her] childhood in his stride”. But the harsh reality is that “he was gone when autumn came”. Autumn symbolises change—the change in the colour of the leaves, the loss of leaves and, in this case, the loss of love. The transient nature of our dream is ever apparent in this song as well as our lives. It can only be our misfortune if we do no accept the changes and losses.

Unfortunately for the character, or singer, of the song, she cannot accept that her lover has left her so she “still [dreams] he’ll come to me/ That we’ll live the years together.” Then comes her realisation that “there are dreams that cannot be”. The tragedy is that “there are storms we cannot weather” meaning some that some heartaches will never fade.

The final stanza again sums up the entire idea of the song. We have a “dream” of how our “life would be” which is “so different from this hell I’m living…and from what it seemed.” This shows how our life is like “hell” compared to our perfect little dreams. The repitition of “so different” intensifies the disillusionment of the singer. The song then builds up to a climatic ending, a final realisation that “life has killed/ The dream I dreamed”. The second part of the song uses harsh and negative words such as “thunder”, “tear”, “shame”, “took”, “gone”, “storms” and “hell” to emphasise and impart to us the fact that reality will not always be how we dream it to be. If we believed otherwise, we would be in a living “hell”.

It is important for us to dream and hope, otherwise we will never achieve anything in life. However, we must also anticipate and be prepared for change, no matter how tragic they may be. Most importantly “I Dreamed a Dream” teaches us to realise that “there are dreams that cannot be” and we should just simply let go.