Even by his apologists Gower is not considered a master of the dream-vision, though he has gained a minor – I think too minor – reputation as one of its demolishers. Most surveys of medieval dream-vision poetry fail to include his uses of dream-visions at all. A. C. Spearing's foundational discussion Medieval Dream-Poetry omits Gower, no doubt because the Confessio Amantis has as a whole only a questionable claim to being in the dream-vision tradition. Kathryn Lynch's High Medieval Dream-Vision includes the Confessio but, in some ways more strangely, does not focus mainly on Gower's explicit dream-visions, in that poem or others. Instead, Lynch treats the Confessio as a whole as an example of how features of the genre have survived outside their original habitat: features such as the figure of Genius and a philosophy of ‘the way that the world is organized to reflect God's plan’, for which she has in mind precedents like Alan of Lille and the Roman de la Rose.

These evasions are kinder than some of the direct attention. To consider Gower's explicit handling of the genre most commentators turn to the Vox Clamantis book I, with its depiction of the ‘Peasants’ Rebellion’ of 1381 in which domesticated or other normally placid animals are monstrously transformed. But this work is often treated as an embarrassing sport in the dream-vision genre. Maria Wickert, still the work's most attentive commentator, notes its structural awkwardness in which, for instance, the author ‘obviously had difficulty padding out’ the description of an entire spring day before falling asleep, because, she ingeniously suggests, ‘Gower did not wish to give up the traditional spring morning scheme [of courtly love allegories], but … was obliged to place the dream at night’ to fit the tradition of exegetical dream-visions. She adds that Gower ‘manipulates historical account and allegorical interpretation in such a way that they never fully coincide … The author leaps continuously from one manner of presentation to another.’