Most poems about dreams make them strange or frightening. In "A Hazy Dream," Faryal Gohar does the opposite: the dream is the one place where the speaker feels safe, and waking up is what hurts. The whole idea is squeezed into the last line, where reality has "no love and only brutality." But the poem's real work is making us feel what is lost in the instant between the two worlds.
The dream is built almost entirely from light and touch. "Buttercups and pasture" give a simple pastoral picture, and the yellow is already in the flower's name before "golden sun was gleaming" repeats it, so the scene seems washed in a single colour. The sun does more than shine. It is "shedding its warm soothing rays, / On every inch of my skin." The verb "shedding" suggests something given off freely, without effort, and it fits a speaker who is lying still while the world does the caring. Even the small non-standard "laying" gives her a passive, unguarded posture, and the plain, spoken diction makes the poem sound like a confidence rather than a performance.
The most interesting line is "And I felt like I'm awake and not dreaming." It is a paradox: the dream feels more real than waking life. The tense slips from "felt" to "I'm," as if the feeling were still present as she tells it. The title's "hazy" matters here too. The dream's edges are blurred, but the sensation is sharp. This sets up the ending, where the "real" world becomes the one that feels unreal and hostile. The simile "Like nothing had end and, / Everything was about to begin" pushes the same way. The line break leaves "and" hanging at the end of the line, so a sentence about endlessness trails off unfinished.
Then a second person appears: "Calming like your touch used to heal, / Once again I remembered that feel." This is the only time anyone but the speaker is mentioned, and "used to" puts that person's comfort firmly in the past. The poem never says who "you" is, but the effect is clear. The sun's warmth works as a stand-in for a touch she no longer has, and "remembered" suggests the dream gave her back a physical memory. Judging by this couplet, the "brutality" of the last line may be less about the world in general than about absence, though the poem leaves that open. Using "feel" as a noun is unusual, and it makes the memory sound like a sensation in the body rather than an idea.
The form acts out the experience. There is almost no full stop. Commas carry the poem along in one long, breathless sentence, the way a dream runs on without clear boundaries, and the only full stop falls at the very end, after the harshest words. The rhyme works in a similar way. The opening lines ("sleep," "landscape," "pasture") do not rhyme, which fits the hazy start. Then the rhymes lock in: gleaming/dreaming, me/free, skin/begin, heal/feel. The two lines where the dream breaks, "I could live like that forever, / But suddenly I woke up," are the ones that rhyme with nothing. The pattern fails exactly when the dream does. The last couplet restores the rhyme, but in a hard, heavy form: "reality" and "brutality" share a clanging ending, and the abstract nouns feel cold after the concrete buttercups, sun and skin.
What makes the poem worth reading is that directness. It does not argue that the world is cruel. It simply sets a vivid, bodily happiness beside a bare, absolute statement and lets the gap do the persuading. The final claim is sweeping, and a reader might ask whether it is a settled belief or just how the morning feels after a good dream. The poem gives no evidence beyond the contrast. That honesty gives it its force, because anyone who has woken from a dream and wanted to go back will recognise the feeling.