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On this day in 1797, the author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born.

Mary’s mother was the well-known feminist and reformer Mary Wollstonecraft. Young Mary is famous for her scandalous affair with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (whom she later married). The story of the summer that they spent together in Switzerland with Byron and some of his friends, is well known. It was there that she wrote her famous novel Frankenstein, after an evening that the assembled company had spent telling ghost stories.

As Mary later recounted, she had a waking dream where: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

Here is a poem that Mary wrote, about a pleasanter kind of dream:

Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!
I will not ask a dearer bliss;
Come with the starry beams, my love,
And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.
’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell,
Love visited a Grecian maid,
Till she disturbed the sacred spell,
And woke to find her hopes betrayed.
But gentle sleep shall veil my sight,
And Psyche’s lamp shall darkling be,
When, in the visions of the night,
Thou dost renew thy vows to me.
Then come to me in dreams, my love,
I will not ask a dearer bliss;
Come with the starry beams, my love,
And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

Today I ask that I will recognise my dreams and learn from them.