Although dreams and dreaming have been readily acknowledged as expressions of Romantic imaginative creativity, it is clear that for Coleridge dreaming was also a physical, painful experience. It was as much a bodily as a psychological experience, and Coleridge vigorously explored the relations between body and mind in dreaming states. His insistence on the corporeal, medical character of dreams challenges the notion of a purely aesthetic, idealist Romantic imagination entirely separated from material or bodily concerns. If dreams are medical, physical occurrences, then the imagination must be seen as capable of participating in physical and medical processes. But this is not to suggest that the roles of the imagination as both poetic and medical, dreaming and diseased, are mutually exclusive. Coleridge and other writers of his day were inspired to explore the mysteries and complexities of dreams because they perceived that they were not merely psychological curiosities, or the result of a large meal consumed before sleeping. Dreams were considered in the contexts of science, medicine, philosophy, superstition and prophecy.

The imagination was not restricted to an aesthetic arena: it was perceived not only as a faculty of the poetic arts, but also as a faculty of medical science. Body and mind were not easily separated, and the relations between the two were crucial in the formation of dreams and dreaming states. Coleridge's awareness of the imagination as a medical entity, capable of both curing and causing diseases, demands that the notion of the imagination as an exclusively poetic, aesthetic faculty be broadened. His engagement with so many diverse texts on dreaming and his recurrent belief in the importance of the bodily in the formation of psychological, emotional states create a more complex and at the same time more accurate portrait of what the imagination is and what its powers are.