Yes, he did have a tendency to look at the darker side of things sometimes. Though to hate dreams is to hate yourself; Poe’s dreams would naturally have been shrouded in images of death, he lost both his parents at the age of two, and his older brother died when Edger was 22, I would imagine it was dreams of these events that he thought of as ‘little slices of death’… he quite possibly lived in constant fear of dying himself, scared he may never wake up; which, ironically, is exactly what happened to him when he was only forty years old.