False Awakening
A false awakening is a vivid and convincing dream about awakening from sleep, while the dreamer in reality continues to sleep. After a false awakening, subjects often dream they are performing daily morning rituals such as showering, cooking, cleaning, eating and using the toilet.
False awakenings, mainly those in which one dreams that they have awoken from a sleep that featured dreams, take on aspects of a double dream or a dream within a dream. A classic example is the double false awakening of the protagonist in Gogol's Portrait (1835).
The Portrait
"The Portrait" (Russian: Портрет) is a short story by Nikolai Gogol, originally published in the short story collection Arabesques in 1835. It is one of Gogol’s most demonic of tales, hinting at some of his earlier works such as "St. John's Eve" and "Viy".
"The Portrait" is the story of a young and penniless artist, Andrey Petrovich Chartkov, who stumbles upon a terrifyingly lifelike portrait in an art shop and is compelled to buy it. The painting is magical and offers him a dilemma — to struggle to make his own way in the world on the basis of his own talents or to accept the assistance of the magic painting to guaranteed riches and fame. He chooses to become rich and famous, but when he comes upon a portrait from another artist which is "pure, faultless, beautiful as a bride" he comes to realize that he has made the wrong choice. Eventually, he falls ill and dies from a fever.
