A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Shakespeare, the characters experience very strange happenings when the venture into the woods. One man experienced having the queen of the fairies fall in love with him leading to having her servant fairies wait on him treating him like royalty while he had an ass’ head. Meanwhile four loves found themselves becoming tangled in a very confused and oddly shaped love triangle. With the many occurrences of dreaming combined with the unusual events taking place one can come to the conclusion that it is because dreams possess a deep and powerful purpose. Shakespeare’s representation of ‘dreams’ in the play is represented in both historical and modern theories. Throughout the play …show more content…
A less common theory of dreams is the actual operation of presenting the dream and the work done to choose what will be presented. Freud believes that the main purpose of a dream is to fulfill a wish and that a dream is composed of the manifest content being what the dreamer remembers, and the latent content as the symbolic meaning of the dream. In order for the dream to do its job and fulfill a wish, it has to go through a process of being translated into the manifest content otherwise known as dream work. “The purpose of dream work is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continuing sleeping.” (Freud, Dream Analysis paragraph 6) At the beginning of the play, Duke Theseus is about to get married to Hippolyta in just four days, although he is growing impatient in having to wait for that day to arrive. Hippolyta tells him, “Four nights will quickly dream away the time;” (Act 1, scene i, line 9) The reason for dreams to seem like they go by quickly is because of dream work and without the dream work doing its job, in one’s sleeping hours the time would drag on …show more content…
The way dreams are portrayed in the play connect to the theories of past and present philosophers and how dreams work. Philosophers like Aristotle and Freud believe that dreams hold a greater purpose than just being random thoughts played out as one sleeps. Dreams could potentially possess the power to predict future events, reveal subconscious feelings or wants. The characters in the play demonstrate how these theories could work in the real life and leave the readers wondering what was real or what was a
In the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Shakespeare, the characters experience very strange happenings when the venture into the woods. One man experienced having the queen of the fairies fall in love with him leading to having her servant fairies wait on him treating him like royalty while he had an ass’ head. Meanwhile four loves found themselves becoming tangled in a very confused and oddly shaped love triangle. With the many occurrences of dreaming combined with the unusual events taking place one can come to the conclusion that it is because dreams possess a deep and powerful purpose. Shakespeare’s representation of ‘dreams’ in the play is represented in both historical and modern theories. Throughout the play …show more content…
A less common theory of dreams is the actual operation of presenting the dream and the work done to choose what will be presented. Freud believes that the main purpose of a dream is to fulfill a wish and that a dream is composed of the manifest content being what the dreamer remembers, and the latent content as the symbolic meaning of the dream. In order for the dream to do its job and fulfill a wish, it has to go through a process of being translated into the manifest content otherwise known as dream work. “The purpose of dream work is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continuing sleeping.” (Freud, Dream Analysis paragraph 6) At the beginning of the play, Duke Theseus is about to get married to Hippolyta in just four days, although he is growing impatient in having to wait for that day to arrive. Hippolyta tells him, “Four nights will quickly dream away the time;” (Act 1, scene i, line 9) The reason for dreams to seem like they go by quickly is because of dream work and without the dream work doing its job, in one’s sleeping hours the time would drag on …show more content…
The way dreams are portrayed in the play connect to the theories of past and present philosophers and how dreams work. Philosophers like Aristotle and Freud believe that dreams hold a greater purpose than just being random thoughts played out as one sleeps. Dreams could potentially possess the power to predict future events, reveal subconscious feelings or wants. The characters in the play demonstrate how these theories could work in the real life and leave the readers wondering what was real or what was a