Coleridge often suggests that his body, diseased and suffering from numerous complaints, causes his dreams and is intimately involved in many dreaming processes (CL v 385–6; N35, fos. 37v–38). His understanding of his body and of its role in dreams was significantly determined by his infirmities and the ways in which they were expressed in his dreams. Pain and disease underscore all of his enquiries into dreams and dreaming. In his efforts to account for both the origin and the nature of his dreams, he explored the fundamental properties that dreams and disease had in common. His deliberations on the body's role in causing dreams led him to examine the complex processes between his body and his mind during dreams. These processes he termed a translation or a transmutation, and for Coleridge they elucidated some of the most important phenomena of sleep and disease. They also revealed to him the many complex and exciting ways in which the imagination acts in dreaming states.

When he was sixty years old, Coleridge wrote in his notebook: ‘I am tied down, and strait-waisted by Disease, & driven inward on my own unworthy Self, fighting with my own sensations, listening to my own moans & groans, & imploring God's mercy on myself, on my miserable Self’ (N50, fo. 35v, 21 February 1832). This entry epitomises an ageing man's weariness as well as Coleridge's perception of his body as a vehicle for suffering, defined by pain and disease. The presence of continual illness meant that he was ‘driven inward’ on himself, forced to fight his ‘own sensations’. When the body is well, it is not often a subject for contemplation; but when sick and harassed by its own organs, it mercilessly forces attention upon itself.