Four short lines are enough for lauray to stage a small collapse: a happy dream, a sour waking, and the cold fact that explains the gap between them. The title, "Dreaming," is a present participle, an ongoing state rather than a finished event. That hints at a speaker who hasn't quite climbed out of the dream, or who would like to go back.
The first couplet plays a quiet trick with pronouns. "Lovely dream of me" sounds self-centred, as though the speaker were the star of the night. Then line three corrects the impression: "It was about you." The poem moves from "me" to "you" in the space of a stanza, and the speaker hands the dream over to someone else. Whatever the dream contained, the speaker's own self was not its subject.
What the dream contained is withheld. The poem says only that it involved "thing you would never do." Because "lovely" is set against "shame," a reader can reasonably infer that these were warm, wished-for acts, but the poem never says so. That gap is useful. Each reader fills it with their own version of the thing that someone, in real life, will not do. The missing article or plural in "thing" gives the line a spoken, unpolished sound. Whether it is a slip or a choice, it suits a feeling captured raw, in the first minutes after waking, before anyone has tidied it up.
"Shame on the reality" is the oddest line. "Shame on you" is the idiom we know, an accusation aimed at a person. Here the shame is redirected at reality itself, an abstraction with no verb attached and no description, just a noun to be scolded. The speaker declines to blame the person and blames the way things are. But the final line takes that generosity back, because "never" is not a gentle word. The speaker does not say "didn't" or "hasn't yet." The phrase is "would never," a judgement about character delivered with total confidence. The poem suggests someone who knows this person well enough to be certain, and the dream is lovely precisely because it is impossible.
The sound pattern is simple and effective. The poem rhymes in couplets, "me" with "reality" and "you" with "do," and its lines alternate between roughly five and seven syllables, short and long, short and long. The short lines state things plainly ("It was about you"), while the longer ones complain. The first rhyme is slightly lopsided. "Reality" is the longest, heaviest word in the poem, and it has to chime with the tiny "me," its last syllable fading out so the rhyme sounds more like a sigh than a click. The second rhyme is clean and full, and it joins the person to the action: "you" and "do." The poem ends on that bare verb, with the act itself still unnamed, so the last word is an action that never happens.
The tenses add to the effect. The poem has only "was" and "would never," the past of the dream and a conditional that points at a future that won't arrive. There is no present-tense happiness anywhere, and the dream is all there is.
The poem's significance lies in how little it needs to say something true. Nightmares are easy to explain, but waking disappointed by a good dream is harder to put into words, and the poem does it with plain vocabulary: "lovely," "shame," "never." There is also a more unsettling idea underneath. The speaker's own mind wrote the dream, so the "you" who did those lovely things was partly an invention, a version of the person edited by hope. Reality is blamed, but the poem leaves open whether the real failure was the person's or the dream's. It offers no consolation and no moral, only the sting of the last line, which is why it lingers longer than its four lines suggest.