Dream, that nothing that is so powerfully something,
may be mocked and belittled—throughout A Midsummer
Night's Dream it often is—but it strikes back at those who
mock it. Lysander defines true love as ‘short as any dream’
(1.1.144) but the play will make the true love of Lysander
and Hermia endure much longer than a night of adventures
in the wood. Hippolyta reassures Theseus that ‘Four nights
will quickly dream away the time’ (I.i.8) before their wedding
but the time will be dream in senses other and far richer
than her lines suggest. Oberon may say of the lovers, ‘When
they next wake, all this derision / Shall seem a dream and
fruitless vision’ (3.2.370-1); yet his next line suggests that
this dream is not a fruitless vision at all, since the result
will be that ‘back to Athens shall the lovers wend / With
league whose date till death shall never end’ (ll. 372-3);
exactly the same contrast between the supposed empty brevity
of the nothing of the dream and the enduring consequences
that hover over Lysander's ‘short as any dream’. Viewed
in this light, Oberon's line suggests a different emphasis:
it is not that the derision is a dream, but that it should
seem so.
[...] Oberon's line has combined dream and vision. If the lovers may
find the experience a ‘fruitless vision’, for Bottom it
was ‘a most rare vision’ (4.1.202). Even Robin advises
the audience that it has seen ‘visions’ (5.1.417). The
audience can choose to take them as trivial, ‘No more yielding
than a dream’ (5.1.419), but, if we have responded to the play
fully, we will share with Bottom the sense of vision, of something
revealed from out there, from the world of fairy, not the false or
trivial world of dream but a revelation of another reality. The obligation
on the audience is to treat the play as a benevolent oneiros,
a true prophetic dream. This dream is an attempt to resolve the
great puzzle of dream-theory, the source of dreams, for this dream
is not the product of the dreamer's imagination or the reformulation
of the experiences of the day but a phenomenon generated by extra-
human forces. Such dreams matter greatly.