write down the images but his flow was interrupted by a visitor The poem remained unfinished like a half-remembered dream The poem feels broken and mysterious as if parts of the dream slipped away A Fragment Another reason Kubla Khan feels like a dream is that it is unfinished and disjointed Coleridge himself described the poem as a fragment The poem moves from one image to another without explaining the connection between them The poem starts with the emperor ordering a stately pleasure-dome to be built in Xanadu Suddenly the poem shifts to describing a wild river flowing through underground caves into a sunless sea Next we see a creepy weird chasm forests and a woman wailing for her demon-lover In the final stanza the speaker remembers a vision of a woman playing music A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw These sudden shifts make the poem feel unpredictable like a dream where scenes change without logic Surreal Images from Imagination In the poem the descriptions images are surreal like something from a dream We see a pleasure dome gardens a sacred river deep caverns deep chasms ancient forests and hills and a sunless sea all mixed together in a way that does not follow real-world logic The palace has caves of ice even though it is in a sunny fertile place This strange combination of opposites hot and cold makes the poem feel more dreamlike As the poet writes It was a miracle of rare device A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice In the second stanza the river suddenly bursts from the earth and rocks fly into the air This kind of dramatic movement feels like something we might see in a dream Failing to Remember In the final stanza the speaker remembers the Abyssinian maid s song and wishes he could revive it If he could he says he would rebuild the palace in the air and amaze everyone with his art Could I revive within me Her symphony and song I would build that dome in air But he cannot the vision is gone This mirrors Coleridge s own experience his dream was interrupted and he could not finish the poem It is like waking up from a beautiful dream and trying but failing to remember it For these reasons Kubla Khan is not just a poem about a dream it is a dream Its broken structure and surreal images make us feel like we are floating through someone else s mind Coleridge s own story the interrupted dream adds to this feeling The poem captures the magic and mystery of dreams the way they dazzle us frighten us and vanish before we can understand them