In "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the relationship of dreams and creation in Kubla Khan’s construction of his pleasure dome is founded in Coleridge's theory of the imagination. His approach is broadly neoplatonic in arguing that the imagination is the faculty that can create new things, unlike reason and preception which are grounded in mimesis. Before something new -- an invention, an art work, etc. -- can be created it must first be imagined, and then the work itself becomes an imitation of what is imagined. Dreams and visions, like the one in which Coleridge himself created the poem, and Kubla saw his vision of the dome, are a source of imagination and thus creation.