Scientifically, sleep is a time of relaxed consciousness for the brain to process and interpret the data thrust upon it throughout the waking hours. It is where the subliminal mind takes control and catches up with the awake brain. This fits what the characters in the play experience, how they feel the repercussions of their actions in sleep, often in a bad way. For example, in the lasting emotional wake of Duncan’s murder, Macbeth describes how he will be “in the affliction of these terrible dreams that shake us nightly. Better be with the dead, whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy” (III. ii. 21-25). Macbeth grasps that killing Duncan, to understate it, may not have been the best and most prudent of his ideas. Now, one of the main ways his guilt affects him is in sleep, where through vision and hallucination, the anguish he experiences may defeat him. Ultimately, as he sleeps, Macbeth’s raw human emotions take charge, and he pays for his offenses psychosomatically. Shakespeare persistently uses sleep to show how Macbeth and Lady Macbeth still bear the ramifications of their crimes, as a period where human feeling is exposed. This contributes to the theme in the play that things are not always as they seem, and sleep makes Macbeth and his wife vulnerable to their wrongdoings culminating in an …show more content…
For example, in a coincidentally excellent illustration of the motif of naturally occurring phenomena matching plot events, thunder rumbles as the witches give their prophecy to Macbeth. The form of an infant apparition appears, telling Macbeth that nobody “of woman born shall harm Macbeth” (IV. i. 91-92). The message gives Macbeth confidence that he is indefatigable. However improbable, at this point a reader acquainted with occasional plot predictability is certain knowledge of a character that evades this axiom will materialize in time. The fact that a baby informs Macbeth of this serves to parallel the idea of the inherited monarchy, that progeny will potentially take the throne, and possibly seal the fate of Macbeth. The current king tries to eliminate future obstacles, but eventually, just as the “worm” that survives will grow into a serpent (this is not how developmental biology works, but as a hyperbolic representation of the buildup of capability, it works), the person who was not born of a woman (but extracted, knowing the end of the plot, so this is somewhat like an editor’s note) will defeat Macbeth, and the children that will have grown up shall succeed the ruler immediately subsequent to Macbeth. The idea of children, and the complex roles they play symbolically and objectively in Macbeth, exemplify the nature of increasing familial and sovereign disorder in the story. Children