Perhaps the view that Anglo-Saxons were simple is merely a reflection of our own simplistic thinking. The title itself suggests a linguistic ambiguity that announces intellectual awareness among the people whose culture prepared them for looking at life in more than one way. In the first line of the poem the speaker reveals an attention to the difference between dream and reality, between the dream itself and the report of the dream that he is about to make. The difference between the telling and the dreaming is as essential in its quiet way as Wordsworth's emotions recollected in tranquility. The difference between day and night, between the public person and the private person, between company and isolation, between light and dark, between professional and personal, between busyness and repose, etc., ad infinitum, indicates, if nothing page 5 else, just difference striking contrast.
Readers note that the dream or spiritual vision occurs when mortal men are wont to rest.
That emphatic split between spiritual vision and mortal snoring, between divine and animal existence, presents not only the contrast between one kind of man and another, but also prepares the reader to accept the dreamer as more authoritative than a mortal man because the dreamer has had a spiritual experience. All indicate a downward direction, a falling. To a medievalist, gesture is important. It is as if outside influences page 6 force the mind to react to them, as if the mind is swept in the direction of the flow of visually perceived objects. In other words, outside forces wyrd, destiny or fate as well as temporal events and situations penetrate the mind and cause it to acknowledge something it has not previously perceived.