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

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,