Importance Of Dreams In A Midsummer Night's Dream

In A Midsummer Nights Dream by William Shakespeare, four Athenian youths struggle with the consequences of their feelings for each other. Hermia and Lysander are madly in love but cannot get married because Hermia’s father doesn’t like Lysander, so they decide to leave their families and elope together. However, their friends Helena and Demetrius have the opposite issue, where Helena endlessly follows Demetrius in pursuit of his affection, but to no avail. Both couples find themselves lost in a forest, where meddling faeries use love potions on the wrong couples, causing both men to fall madly in love with Helena. Though a series of mystical events and fantastical intervention, the four Athenians fall in love with the correct partner and are all allowed to be married. As suggested in the title, sleep and dreams hold a great deal of thematic value in this work. Throughout the play, Shakespeare uses dreams as a catalyst for most of the main events in the book, and to allow for the mysterious and fanatical to occur without questioning or a need for reason. To each character, dreams have special meanings and value, and shape their perception of their encounters with the unknown. Shakespeare uses dreams to allow for peace to be made between people fighting. For Titania, the fairy Queen, dreams allow for her to stop hating her …show more content…
Often in this play, an event will occur or feelings will change so quickly and dramatically that they would never occur in that manner. However, dreams and sleep open the door for these occurrences because they allude to themes of mystery. Dreams and sleep also resolve the conflicts of the play, from Oberon and Titania’s fights over the Indian boy to Demetrius and Lysander hating each other because of their mutual infatuation with Helena. In the end, all is right, but only because Shakespeare includes dreams to make sense of love, conflict, and