Here we have the start of a new section in the book of Song of Solomon. The image of the garden and the spring are now behind us. The wife tells of a particular experience. In order to give this experience a proper place, it is important to see the circumstances in which it happened.
The first part of this verse is very important: I slept, but my heart was awake.
That is what happens when you dream. This feeling that your heart is awake happens when a dream is very powerful. You are asleep but you feel things as if you were awake. Things can also happen in a dream that do not happen to you in ordinary life. Reality is often mixed with fantasy. Often this fantasy is things that you later find very difficult to place. Such a powerful dream could make it clear that in your mind you are very much occupied with the people and things that occur in your dream: things and people that are very important or also threatening to you.
The woman’s dream makes it clear how important her husband is to her. It shows how strong her desire is to be his wife, and how she longs for him in love and she is convinced that this is the same with her husband. Therefore, in her dream she sees that her husband is knocking on her door at night and that he enters.
2 I slept, but my heart was awake. A sound! My beloved is knocking. “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night.”