William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is filled with details up to reader interpretation from hypothetical curtain open, to curtain close. If the title of the play did not give it away, dreams are obviously at the forefront of these interpretations. Shakespeare’s play is a story of dreams and magic versus the harsh reality of love and real life. It follows, primarily, a few different groups of characters: there are four young lovers (Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander) who form a convoluted sort of love-quadrilateral, if you will (initially, Hermia and Lysander are in love while Helena loves Demetrius but Demetrius loves Hermia); there is a company of amateur and unprofessional actors, most importantly a weaver named Nick Bottom,
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While it is happening, namely, in the middle of the dream, what the dreamer is experiencing feels unquestionably real and incredibly true, regardless of how absurd or irrational the dream turns out to be; very rarely does the dreamer question the nature of their reality. This is epitomized in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s first round of dreams, or the characters’ waking up into a dream state. After magic was used on them, Lysander and Demetrius had no perception of their dramatic personality change though it was perfectly obvious to both Hermia and Helena (a perfect example of nothing seeming strange in a dream while in the middle of it, no matter how strange). When a person wakes up and regains full consciousness, or at least begins to do so, what moments ago seemed so clear and genuine in existence, now feels rapidly fading and transparently untrue. The (past-tense) dreamer has trouble remembering the events of the dream and for a moment just after waking up, probably will not even be entirely aware of where they are. This is reflected precisely with the characters’ second round of awakening, or rather waking up out of the dream state. The four lovers, along with Titania are aware upon their waking of the strangeness of what happened to them while in the dream state, while simultaneously being perplexed at where exactly they are and were. The various types and instances of characters’ awakenings are important in that they reflect the natural way that we, as humans, perceive and come to accept our dreams in terms of the reality that we each live
While it is happening, namely, in the middle of the dream, what the dreamer is experiencing feels unquestionably real and incredibly true, regardless of how absurd or irrational the dream turns out to be; very rarely does the dreamer question the nature of their reality. This is epitomized in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s first round of dreams, or the characters’ waking up into a dream state. After magic was used on them, Lysander and Demetrius had no perception of their dramatic personality change though it was perfectly obvious to both Hermia and Helena (a perfect example of nothing seeming strange in a dream while in the middle of it, no matter how strange). When a person wakes up and regains full consciousness, or at least begins to do so, what moments ago seemed so clear and genuine in existence, now feels rapidly fading and transparently untrue. The (past-tense) dreamer has trouble remembering the events of the dream and for a moment just after waking up, probably will not even be entirely aware of where they are. This is reflected precisely with the characters’ second round of awakening, or rather waking up out of the dream state. The four lovers, along with Titania are aware upon their waking of the strangeness of what happened to them while in the dream state, while simultaneously being perplexed at where exactly they are and were. The various types and instances of characters’ awakenings are important in that they reflect the natural way that we, as humans, perceive and come to accept our dreams in terms of the reality that we each live