The poem depicts a mental process that involves profound shifts in the poet's consciousness. Although the poet tells a story about an outer event—how his sleep was disturbed by raccoons in the kitchen—he also simultaneously describes the inner workings of his own mind. When the poem begins, he is asleep and possibly dreaming (he refers to sleep and the bed itself as a "dream womb"), which means that he either has no conscious awareness (sleep), or an illusory one (dreams).

When he is first awakened by the sounds of the disturbance in the kitchen, he becomes angry. After he rises, he shouts and is ready to chase the raccoons away with a stick. He still shouts at them when they have escaped up a tree. This shows that the narrator is in the typical waking state of consciousness, in which consciousness is centered on...