What is the importance of Dreamland in the poem, After Apple Picking?

The poem’s exploration of alternate realities, in addition to various temporal shifts that occur throughout the poem, is emphasized the most through the speaker’s entrance into a dream state. In fact, the poem seems to question whether alternate realities created in the mind are meaningfully different. After all, while the number of opportunities, possibilities, and choices represented by the apples increases in the dream from “two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough” to “ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,” the speaker’s own psychological and biological disinclination to pick the apples remains the same in each case (4-5). In that sense, the dream sequence and its disappointing similarities to waking realities question the triumphant intellectual freedom associated with the fantastical imaginings of the human mind. The elements of the alternative reality are still very much contained by the constraints of the non-alternative reality: the speaker’s dream is perhaps “just some human sleep” (42). To a certain degree, “After Apple-Picking” even seems to contest whether alternate realities even exist – after all, the speaker’s apple picking in dreamland is not meaningfully different from his apple picking in a fully conscious state.