Songfacts®:

• "A Dream Within A Dream" is the instrumental opening track on The Alan Parsons Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, a concept album built around the works of American gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe. It's based on Poe's poem of the same title.
  
  Published in 1849, Poe's poem is about watching the sands of his life slip through the hands of time and wondering if the whole thing had been just a dream from the start.
• In 1987 Parsons remixed Tales of Mystery and Imagination and added an Orson Welles monologue to the beginning of this song. Welles composed the monologue from some of Poe's more obscure writings.
  
  Welles never got to hear it: He passed away in 1985, two years before the remix was done. He'd sent the recordings to Parsons back in 1976, just after the album's original release. He and Parsons never physically met.
• Tales of Mystery and Imagination is intended to be listened to as a whole. "A Dream Within A Dream" is meant to operate as an introduction to the rest of the story.
• Critics have always been sharply divided on concept albums, with many considering them to be bleak toilets of the rock industry. Others saw them as interesting experiments with the pop-music art form. Tales of Mystery and Imagination received that same wide range of critique, but it was popular with fans, sold reasonably well (#38 on US chart), and grew to attain a cult status that it enjoys to this day.
• Parsons, an engineer on The Dark Side Of The Moon album, said Pink Floyd were an inspiration for Tales of Mystery and Imagination in the sense that he wanted to create a soundscape to get lost in rather than a collection of radio-ready singles like a typical rock album. The Floyd influence comes across strongly in this song.
• In 2004, Parsons released his fourth solo album, A Valid Path. It includes a track titled "A Recurring Dream Within a Dream," which melds this song with "The Raven," another track from Tales of Mystery and Imagination.