This questioning opening to Byron's ‘The Dream’, written in 1816, succinctly touches upon many of the fundamental and often contradictory opinions on the nature of dreams and dreaming during the Romantic period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was no consensus on the origin and meaning of dreams. Some argued that they were miraculous, potentially divine events. Many believed that dreams revealed the powers of the imagination and that dreaming was a form of poetic inspiration. Others argued that they were entirely attributable to the dreamer's physical or psychological constitution. In seeking to formulate his own answers, Coleridge turned to the writings of antiquity as well as those of his contemporaries. From ancient writers he gleaned the notion that dreams have the potential for prophecy and can ‘speak like Sibyls of the future’. In the works of some of his contemporaries he encountered the theory that dreams are caused by spirits taking possession of the dreamer for short periods during sleep.