Dreaming In A Midsummer Night's Dream

The role of dreaming in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to uncover the different relationships between reality and a dream.
The major theme in the story is dreaming which recurs primarily when the characters attempt to explain their peculiar events in the magical forest, “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” In the ancient and traditional countryside of England, people believed that dreams were direct messages from one or multiple deities, from deceased persons, angels, or from God himself, and that they predicted the future, to warn or help what was going to happen. Some cultures practiced dream incubation with the intention of cultivating dreams that are of prophecy dreams were the product of “divine” interaction

between humanity and religion. Not only was dreams were used as interaction, it was also used to tell us about the wonders of heaven to come, warn us about our lack of faith or behavior but it is just a dream. A dream is not real, even though it seems so at the time we experienced it. The basis for this began with the biblical figures, for example; Joseph, after being in Egypt for a time became a Dream Reader, an interpreter to the Pharaoh, warning him of a famine to come. Another example would be Joseph, the father figure, when an angel in his dream told him that Mary has done no wrong to him but was carrying the child of the Lord. Shakespeare creates this dream like environment quality in numerous ways and in so doing time loses its sense of flow. In addition, Shakespeare has made significant use of dreams throughout his plays, invoking the conception of dream as supernatural powers or an omen.
During Shakespeare's time, it was common in England to try to divine the future of love and lives at Midsummer - through dreams and other superstitions. One could have one's fortune told about the likelihood of a relationship lasting, the likely loyalty of a new young love and so on. The season that we call spring did not exist in Shakespeare’s time, only summer, autumn, and winter - so the play does in effect take place at their “Midsummer”. The start and height of summer was a big deal, with many festivities such as May Day and Dawn services. Young maidens also used flowers to guess their romantic fortunes – dreams, however, are fleeting and fickle and not to be relied upon, like the events in the play.
The experiences of dreaming, falling in love and watching a play are similar in the sense that in all three of them, people “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” (1. 2. 234). In other words, whatever they see in dreams, their lovers, or a play is essentially a projection of their subjective imagination. According to Jung, one of the rude mechanicals, said “a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic.”(Jung 53). The lover, as Titania and the four Athenian youths demonstrate, can attribute his/her beloved with imaginary qualities: it “Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt” (5. 1. 11) and transposes “things base and vile, holding no quantity” into “form and dignity” (1. 2. 232-233); and Theseus’ comment on the mechanicals’ play that “If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.” (5. 1. 208-209) suggesting that it is the spectator’s imagination that really matters in the appreciation of plays, regardless of the artistry of actors—even the best actors are “but shadows”, displaying only a imitation of the play’s actions, and it requires imagination on the audience’s side to really see them as what they represent, while by a more active engagement of his or her imaginative faculties, one can amend the difference in the performance of an lesser actor.
By putting them in analogous terms, Shakespeare is saying that lovers and spectators of plays are also “dreamers”, who, instead of merely “seeing” things, are forever in the process of imaginatively “creating” the objects of their affection and attention out of their “seething brains”.

Once these analogies are established, they lead us to further contemplate our sense of perception in everyday life: our minds are not screens loyally reflecting the outside world but active interpreters that are constantly ordering and reshaping sensory impressions according to our own mental scheme of things, and there is a subjective projection of imagination in all that we see or feel—we can never see things “as they really are” but only things “as we see them to be”, and sometimes the disparity between these too can be so large that after some bitter disillusionment, we can only think of the past derision as “a dream and fruitless vision” (3. 2. 371). The line that separates dreaming from waking life is thus blurred: like characters in the play, we cannot tell clearly where conscious life ends and dream begins. As the embodiment of imagination, irrationality and unconsciousness, the dream also challenges the boundaries of human reason and the idea of a stable, solid and unifying selfhood.
The difference between appearances and reality is also explored through the play-within-a-play, to particularly comic effect. The "rude mechanicals" completely fail to understand the magic of the theatre,

which depends upon the audience being allowed to believe (for a time, at least) that what is being acted out in front of them is real.
When Snug the Joiner tells the stage audience that he is not really a lion and that they must not be afraid of him, we (the audience) laugh at this foolishness, but we also know and laugh at ourselves — for we know that he is not just a joiner pretending to be a lion, but an actor pretending to be a joiner pretending to be a lion. Shakespeare seems to be saying, "We all know that this play isn't real, but you're still sitting there and believing it." That is a kind of magic too. That the magic of the author to instill in the audience to perceive you even it may or may not be true. This is the magic of Shakespeare for making a dream almost to a reality. Giving even more basis to the fact that dreams are not real and some people considered them real. Dreams are subconscious happening in the brain and occurs when the person is sleeping. Dreams have no meaning but do revolve in your life, they are almost real, but they are unrehearsed and unexpected series of unexpected events occurring in sleep. It is almost like a play that may or may not connected to real life.