J. Sheridan Le Fanu's A Drunkard's Dream: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

“A Drunkard’s Dream” is a phenomenal if unorthodox place to start a survey of Le Fanu’s supernatural tales, not only because it is among his earliest works, but also due to its representative nature: while not considered one of the true greats, it nonetheless splendidly illustrates Le Fanu’s shadowy cosmic vision. The tale picks up several themes which are now considered central to its author’s oeuvre: the cruelty of fate, the certainty of punishment, the fundamental wickedness of mankind, the uncomfortably blurry lines between life and death – good and evil, reality and fantasy – and his brutal vision of the afterlife.

Let’s go into further detail with this last point: Le Fanu is famed for his brimstone-lit plots which involve ghosts and demons gleefully exacting existential punishments on the wicked – a viewpoint which was unquestionably fed by his father’s Calvinist-influenced theology. The Calvinist worldview is marked by a uniquely harrowing spiritual anxiety, one far more acute than in other branches of Christianity, due to its doctrine of predestination—the belief that God has already, from eternity, chosen who will be saved and who will be damned.

Unlike Catholicism or Arminian Protestantism, which emphasize repentance, sacraments, or good works as means of participating in one’s salvation, Calvinism insists that no human effort can alter one's divine fate. This renders traditional moral striving both essential and terrifyingly uncertain, as even outward virtue may be the behavior of the reprobate mimicking the elect. The result is an existential paranoia: the gnawing suspicion that one is damned no matter what one does, and that signs of grace may be counterfeit. This leads to a sense of spiritual helplessness, in which the soul is gripped not by guilt alone, but by a deeper terror—that it was never meant to be saved at all, and that even the impulse to reform may be part of a cruel, predestined delusion.

II.

And so it is that in so many of Le Fanu’s tales, the destined arrival of an unavoidable fate is the raison d’être for the supernatural. Calvinist themes pervade the moral and metaphysical structure underpinning stories like “A Drunkard’s Dream.” This tale reflects a stark view of human depravity, divine justice, and predestination—central Calvinist doctrines. The dream vision at the heart of the story serves as both a warning and a moment of terrifying grace. It dramatizes the notion that salvation is not earned through merit but granted through divine intervention, with the dream acting as a providential wake-up call rather than a mere psychological episode. The story’s bleak moral universe, where sin is real, consequences eternal, and human will fragile, echoes Calvinist anxieties about election, reprobation, and the inscrutability of God’s judgment, lending it a chilling theological gravity beneath its sensational surface.

There is something tremendously primal about this vision – one that harkens back to childhood nightmares, cautionary tales, the boogeyman, and Santa Claus. Whereas most fictional ghosts from the Victorian period were concerned with flushing out murderers, revealing hidden gold, and chastising unworthy lovers, Le Fanu’s specters are far less personable: they don’t care who you are, because to them, the afterlife is just a job: they are supernatural bailiffs – bounty-hunters, repo-men, loan sharks, and hatchet-men – mercenaries of the devil. And no amount of pleading, explaining, or rationalizing will move them. It’s just their job.

SUMMARY

Le Fanu's story is told from the perspective of a Protestant clergyman who recounts a harrowing experience that forever changed his understanding of dreams, morality, and the boundaries between life and death. The tale begins with a meditation on the mysterious nature of dreams and their potential as divine instruments of intervention. The narrator insists he is about to recount a real event which convinced him that dreams could be vehicles of God’s mercy—even to seemingly irredeemable souls.

The story truly begins one bleak November morning when the clergyman is awakened by a sobbing girl who pleads with him to attend her dying father. She hesitates to give his name, fearing the priest will refuse, but ultimately admits that he is Pat Connell, a well-known local drunkard and lost cause. Despite past failures to reform Connell, the priest agrees to accompany her. They pass through the dark, filthy lanes of the town until they reach Connell’s dilapidated home. Inside, the priest finds a scene of death and squalor. Connell lies motionless, his face grotesquely distorted with what seems to be the very expression of damnation. A physician present confirms Connell has died, and the clergyman, mourning the man’s apparently unrepentant death, leads the family in prayer.

But during the prayers, a horrifying moment occurs: the “corpse” suddenly moves, sits up with eyes rolling and bandages askew, and gestures toward the living.

Everyone is frozen in terror. The priest momentarily imagines demonic possession has overtaken the body. But it turns out Connell was not dead. The doctor determines that a delayed bleeding from a lancet had revived him from a deathlike state—some strange combination of catalepsy, apoplexy, and alcohol-induced collapse. Connell is still speechless but obeys the doctor’s instructions.

Four days later, the priest is allowed to visit the recovering Connell, who appears desperate to speak. When they are alone, Connell tells him that during his collapse he had seen hell. He describes in vivid detail a long fall through the floor into an enormous, suffocating subterranean hall, lit by blood-red fireballs. He found himself seated at a colossal table surrounded by a multitude of shadowy figures—“men beyond reckoning”—stretching endlessly in both directions. The setting was vast, suffocating, and alien.

Though at first he could not discern where he was, he became aware of an oppressive atmosphere, “a close smothering feel in it, that was not natural,” and a strange red illumination that seemed to throb and pulse. He looked up and saw the source: “great balls of blood-coloured fire” rolling overhead, casting their lurid glow on the “ribs of a great roof of rock that was arched overhead instead of the sky.” This imagery conjured a vision not of flames or traditional torments, but of vast geological confinement—an underground cathedral of the damned, made of oppressive heat, sound, and stone.

The fire roared and trembled with a “rushing, trembling sound,” giving the whole place a sense of constant vibration, of being on the verge of collapse or eruption. When Connell attempted to leave, a childlike voice beside him whispered, “Sit down again, you can never leave this place,” the eerie softness of the voice contrasting terrifyingly with its meaning. The voice’s owner smiled, calm and resigned—doomed and beyond struggling—mirroring the helplessness Connell began to feel.

But the heart of the vision was the terrifying figure seated at the far end of the table, whom Connell instinctively knew was Satan. He described this being as “taller than twelve men,” with a face both “very proud and terrible to look at.” When this figure stood and stretched out his hand, a dreadful hush fell over the assembly: “all that was there, great and small, bowed down with a sighing sound.” The silence was not reverent but smothered by awe and submission. Connell felt utterly powerless before this being, as if he were “his own, to do what he liked with.”

When he pleaded to leave in “the name of God,” the dark figure responded, “If you promise to return, you may depart for a season.” The voice was “terrible and mournful,” and its echoes “went rolling and swelling down the endless cave, and mixing with the trembling of the fire overhead,” creating a cacophony that became an extension of hell itself—endless, resonant, inescapable.

When the figure sat again, the sound that followed was “like the roaring of a furnace,” suggesting not just heat and punishment, but an eternal engine fueled by despair. Connell agreed to return, cried, “In God’s name let me go,” and immediately lost all sensation.

When he woke, he was back in his bed, soaked in blood, surrounded by his family and the priest—his escape seemingly real, but temporary. The hell he saw was not made of pitchforks and torture, but of dominion, despair, and the weight of a fate already promised.

Deeply disturbed by the dream, Connell begs the priest to tell him whether he is already damned. The clergyman, though skeptical of the dream’s literal truth, sees the opportunity for moral and spiritual renewal and tells Connell that the vision should be taken as a warning rather than a prophecy. Redemption is still possible if he reforms his life.

This counsel gives Connell hope, and he begins a true and lasting transformation. He gives up alcohol, avoids his former companions, resumes his carpentry, and embraces sobriety and piety. The priest observes this transformation with cautious optimism, especially when he finds Connell reinforcing the very floor landing through which he had dreamt of falling into hell.

Time passes and Connell continues to live a respectable and industrious life. But one day, shortly after a brief and cheerful encounter with the priest, he dies unexpectedly.

Having run into an old friend just returned to town, Connell had agreed to a celebratory drink. Though he initially promised to abstain, he gave in to temptation. He returned home drunk and unconscious, and his wife sat up with him late into the night before falling into a troubled sleep. She awoke to see two figures leaving the room—one of them was her husband. Moments later, a heavy crash echoed through the house. Pat Connell had fallen headlong down the stairs and broken his neck on the very landing referenced in his dream.

The wife insists that the second figure she saw was not a shadow, but a distinct presence that seemed to turn back and communicate with her husband before they exited. The narrator offers a rational explanation, but the experience leaves him deeply shaken. He ends the story haunted by the eerie parallel between Connell’s death and his vision, unable to say whether it was coincidence, prophecy fulfilled, or some darker mystery realized. The final note is one of spiritual dread and unanswered questions: was Connell’s soul reclaimed by the devil to whom he had made a promise—or was it a warning tragically unheeded? The narrator does not presume to know.

ANALYSIS

“The coincidence was terrible.” And rightfully so. Le Fanu’s greatest works have always drawn strength from their uncomfortable ambiguity. E. F. Benson famously compared Le Fanu’s supernatural oeuvre to Henry James’ ghost stories. James was unquestionably influenced by Le Fanu when he penned his own spook tales: “The Turn of the Screw,” “The Real Right Thing,” “The Ghostly Rental,” “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” “The Way it Came,” and so on – stories that are energized by their lack of certainty: are the ghosts real, imagined, hallucinated, invented, purely literary, or – horror of horrors – a combination of the previous?

Le Fanu’s spirits – even the gory-mouthed Carmilla – can almost always be explained away by those who wish to solve a puzzle, vindicated by those who wish to believe, and left untouched and in place by those who wish to enjoy the mystery.

Pat’s terrible dream can be written off so easily – a whiskey-fueled cheese dream made worse by his failing liver and heart which send him into a brief coma. The death is perfectly natural, and the beckoning stranger his wife saw is explained away by the narrator with ease. Then why does the priest shudder at the end of the story – a weird little coincidence – and why does he now see the world as a changed and thoroughly altered place – why does he hear and see “everything as if under the spell of a nightmare”?

The narrator of “A Drunkard’s Dream” has conveniently stumbled onto the most characteristic flavor of Le Fanu’s ghost stories. In a word, they are crepuscular – meaning, belonging to the shadowy, dusky realm of twilight, having to do with that neighborhood where darkness and light meet and blend into a murky haze. His tales are steeped in shared duality, in multifaceted character, in blended identity. This, of course, is easily informed by his own background: he was simultaneously Norman and Celtic, irreligious and devout, a devoted husband and a neglectful spouse, Catholic and Protestant, a man of the city and a man of the country, a writer of rational mysteries and a writer of irrational ghost stories.

Likewise is his stand-in, Pat Connell, a denizen of overlapping zones which should be mutually exclusive: he is alive when he is dead, and dead when he is alive, a reformed teetotaler who wins admiration and a fallen drunkard who merits disgust, a man of prayer and a man of drink, a man of faith and a man of sin, a wastrel of local infamy and a family man with pious children.

Le Fanu blends these zones into an uncomfortable murk, and while the primary blurring is obviously the one between reality and fantasy – imagination and sensation, dreams and consciousness, supernatural and natural – I think it is the more realistic discrepancies that Le Fanu wants to draw our attention to, and wrap our minds around: a degenerate drunkard with a loving family; a man who psychologically wants to be sober but is overridden by his physical addiction; a person who yearns for redemption and agency, but is robbed of it by his own weaknesses. This uncanny border-realm of shadows is the zone where Le Fanu truly excels.  

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated edition of Le Fanu's best ghost stories HERE!