The Dream Creates the Dreamer

Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing. William Blake. c.1786

At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when all of the other characters leave the stage, the playful Puck lingers a moment longer. Turning to the audience, he breaks the fourth wall - or perhaps more fittingly for a fairy such as him - he sneaks a mischievous glance at us from behind an imaginary curtain. “If we shadows have offended,” Puck begins:

Think but this and all is mended:

That you have but slumbered here 

While these visions did appear.

This monologue comes out of nowhere. It is not an epilogue, an afterword of what happens after “the break of day”, nor does it offer us a moral to take home. Instead, Puck pleads that we forgive them visions, if we have found their antics insulting. Then he asks for our hands to applaud the play. This will allow him to “restore amends”, to recover what has been wronged. What that is we do not know. So we give our hands, we clap. And just like a hypnotist at the end of a session, we have given ourselves the cue to come out of our slumber. Now we are awake. But when did we ever fall asleep in the first place?

Shakespeare’s Dream opens up many possible gates for interpretation, yet it never points precisely through which one must enter. In the play, seemingly incompatible characters, physical realms and states of consciousness mingle into an amalgamation of complimentary contradictions. There must be some point of intersection for the viewer - or in our case, the reader - contemplates the validity of each small part, yet does not question the validity of the whole. 

On a deeper level, inaccessible to the mind engaged in thought, this medley somehow makes sense. Not in a logical or understandable way, but rather in a way that makes itself fit, molding itself as to appear comprehensible, solid - able to be broken into pieces, each then put under a microscope.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream operates like a dream - you may analyze it endlessly, break down its components, and try to find a train of thought that produces each scene after the other, but eventually, you will reach an impasse. You cannot deconstruct the dream and you surely cannot put it back together afterwards. All of this is done while awake, because in the state of dreaming there is no questioning of the dream. It just happens, naturally; there is no thinking per se. The dreamer is not a thinker, the dreamer becomes a conduit for the dream to manifest itself. Therefore, the only useful faculty of the dreamer is to stay unaware that he is dreaming - just like Borges’s dreamer whose “immediate obligation was to dream.”

In the Dream Titania, Bottom and the lovers all fall under a spell at various points during the action. The first ones are Lysander and Hermia. Upon being awakened by Helena, Lysander declares his love for her. Of course, we, the outsiders, know that it is not really him being in love, but the potion which makes him appear in love. Lysander the Dreamer remembers being in love with Hermia in some distant, “tedious”, past, yet, unlike Helena, he no longer seems to possess an understanding of the past and the future. He is only in the here and now, he knows Helena to be his only true love, he does not question or rationalize his feelings, nor does he manage to justify them in a manner acceptable for Helena. Helena, on the other hand, is very much aware of the discrepancy she is witnessing. Something must have happened to Lysander, yet she will never find out what. What she also does not know is that she is the cue without which Lysander the Dreamer will never enter the stage. Lysander does not dream of Helena, he awakes, so to speak, in the dream not as an observer but as an active participant. Therefore, he is unaware of the dream. Everything he experiences seems to be in its right place: “The will of man is by his reason swayed, / and reason says you are the worthier maid.”

Interestingly, the only actual dream is the one Hermia wakes up from later in the same scene:

Help me, Lysander, help me! Do thy best

To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast. 

Ay me, for pity! What a dream was here!

This may seem like an unimportant detail, yet it draws a very clear distinction. Hermia wakes up terrified and calls for Lysander to help her. Gradually, she becomes aware that there was no serpent whatsoever and she had just had a nightmare. Thus, she is able to separate what is real from what is not, no matter how true the dream must have felt. We see this once again when Demetrius falls in love with Helena, leaving both Helena and Hermia fighting over what seems to be the reason behind such an unfortunate course of events. The problem is that they are trying to rationalize the situation by turning to what they know(or think theyknow) about eachother. Though no potion was applied on their lids, they are also not aware of their beloveds’ dreams. Helena and Hermia think something really happened. They have no other choice but to play their respective parts - unconscious of the fact that they are not acting out of reason but that the dream is acting through them.

Act III begins with the mechanicals’ rehearsal of their play. Puck then enters. Deliberate to have some fun, he turns Bottom’s head into that of an ass, who afterwards scares away the innocent mechanicals. Bottom is oblivious to his new head and explains the effect he has on others not as one stemming from himself, but as a trick on their part: “This is to make an ass of me, to fright me, if they could. But I will not stir from this place, do what they can.” Next comes his magical rendezvous with the faeries and Titania - a meeting in which he seems surprisingly uninterested. Titania is under the love potion and she acts most accordingly. She professes her love for him, showers him with compliments, and orders the faeries to attend to his every need. The situation is laughable, given these two characters’ diametrically opposed dimensions of existence, conduct and ways of seeing the world. What makes it even more ridiculous is the fact that Bottom is also under a spell. Puck did not just replace Bottom’s human head with a donkey one. To the plain eye he did, but to the realm of the Dream Bottom gradually starts acting like a real donkey. He becomes one unbeknown to himself.

In the beginning of the rehearsal Puck says he will be an “auditor”, a passive listener to the play. Yet just a line later, he makes a different claim: “[I’ll be] an actor too perhaps, if I see cause.” If Puck had actually become an actor, we probably would not have paid much attention to his transformation. After all, is not that what is expected of him? We do not know exactly what Puck or the other fairies are - neither can we conclude their purpose. Puck’s realm is the unknown, unlike Bottom’s, who is very much grounded into his rational, skeptical, view of the world. Could it be fair to say then that, though Puck orchestrates it, Bottom is the new actor, a sort of an unconscious method actor? Bottom becomes an ass whose only “great desire” is that of a bottle of hay or “a peck of provender: I could munch your good dry oats, methinks.”

When exactly did Bottom change? Can we pinpoint the precise moment he was no longer human but a puppet under the great fancy of the hobgoblin? No. Neither can he for when he wakes up from his sleep in act IV, there seems to be no recollection of his encounter with Titania and the faeries. His first thought is to ensure he does not miss his cue - he is anxious to step into his role at the right moment, else the play would not work. Then he realizes he was asleep to begin with:

I have had a most rare vision.

I have had a dream past the wit of man to say

what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about

to expound this dream. Methought I was—there

is no man can tell what. Methought I was and

methought I had—but man is but a patched fool 

if he will offer to say what methought I had.

Bottom’s soliloquy captures the elusive essence of the Dream. It frames that which is formless and the result is a vertiginous clash of grammar, words and meaning. Man is “but an ass,” if he tries to explain his dream. There would not be common ground as the ground is absent; the dream is bottomless. And yet Bottom concludes by aspiring to create a ballet based on his dream. What would that look like - what music and movement, what speech would illustrate it best? Should we as audience part our eyes so we could see what both is and it is not?

There is much truth in Theseus’s demystification of the lovers’ story. These “antic fables” are nothing but the futile product of imagination that “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Illusory stories about something that never was. But when Hippolyta observes that all four lovers tell the same story, she cannot help but wonder whether there is “something of great constancy.” If not, then poor Demetrius - for how is it that nothing really happened and yet he makes his final entry still entrapped into this lucid dream?

“We will make amends ere long,” promises Puck. Do not preoccupy yourself with what you just witnessed - before you leave, everything that was disturbed will be put back in place. If you find it troubling, remember the declamatory voice of reason: this was only a dream. 

Now all the actors are awake.

So as we leave the theater, let us recount our dreams.