Themes Part 2: Dreams, Order vs Disorder & Art

If love and magic provide the play's emotional engine, the themes of dreams, order vs disorder, and art provide its intellectual framework. These themes ask: what is real? How do we distinguish dreams from waking? What is the purpose of imagination? This lesson explores these questions in detail.

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Dreams

The Dream Motif

The word "dream" runs through the entire play:

Moment	Who Dreams	Significance
The title	The audience	The play itself is framed as a dream
The forest experience	All the lovers	They wake uncertain whether the night was real
Bottom's dream (4.1)	Bottom	The most profound engagement with the dream motif
Puck's epilogue	The audience	"Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here"

Dreams vs Reality

The play constantly blurs the boundary between dreaming and waking:

• The lovers wake in the forest unable to distinguish their enchanted experiences from dreams: "Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream" (4.1).
• Bottom wakes and knows he has experienced something extraordinary but calls it a "dream" because he has no other framework for understanding it.
• Puck's epilogue invites the audience to treat the entire play as a dream — "That you have but slumber'd here / While these visions did appear."

Why Dreams Matter

Dreams in the play represent:

• The space between reality and illusion — just as the forest is the space between Athens (reality) and the fairy world (magic).
• The unconscious — desires, fears, and truths that cannot be expressed in the rational, waking world.
• Theatre itself — a play is a kind of shared dream, experienced collectively and then released.

Bottom's Dream Speech

Bottom's response to his "dream" is the play's most unexpected moment of depth:

"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."

He grasps that his experience was beyond rational understanding — and wisely decides not to try to explain it. His instinct to have it turned into a ballad connects to the play's theme of art as the appropriate vehicle for the inexpressible.

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Order vs Disorder

Athens vs The Forest

The play's geography maps onto the opposition between order and disorder:

	Athens	The Forest
Represents	Law, reason, patriarchal authority, social hierarchy	Freedom, chaos, magic, desire, nature
Who rules	Theseus (the Duke)	Oberon (the Fairy King)
Relationships	Fixed by law (Egeus chooses Hermia's husband)	Fluid, magical, constantly shifting
Language	Formal, legalistic	Poetic, lyrical, chaotic
Outcome	Conflict (Hermia must obey or face punishment)	Transformation (identities shift, love is rearranged)

The Pattern of Comedy

The play follows the classic comic pattern:

1. Order — Athens, with its laws and hierarchies (Act 1).
2. Disorder — The forest, where everything is confused (Acts 2–4).
3. Restored order — Athens again, with the lovers correctly paired and married (Act 5).

But the "restored order" is not identical to the original order:

• Egeus is overruled — his patriarchal authority is challenged.
• Demetrius is still enchanted — the new order depends partly on magic.
• The fairies bless the marriages — supernatural forces underpin the human resolution.

The Fairy Quarrel and Natural Disorder

Oberon and Titania's quarrel causes disorder in the natural world:

"The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts / Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose... / The spring, the summer, / The childing autumn, angry winter, change / Their wonted liveries." — Titania, 2.1

This speech establishes that the fairy world and the natural world are interconnected. When the fairies are in conflict, nature itself is disordered. This gives the fairy quarrel cosmic significance — it is not merely a domestic dispute but a disruption of the entire natural order.

When Oberon and Titania are reconciled, natural order is restored — and their blessing of the marriages in Act 5 ensures that the social order will also prosper.

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Art, Imagination, and Theatre

Theseus on Imagination

Theseus's speech in Act 5 is the play's most direct meditation on imagination and art:

"The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact: / One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, / That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, / Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: / The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name."

What Theseus Means

• The lunatic sees things that are not there (devils).
• The lover sees beauty where there is none ("Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt" — seeing a beautiful Greek face on an Egyptian one).
• The poet gives form to things that do not exist — turning "airy nothing" into something with "a local habitation and a name."

Theseus is dismissive of imagination — he groups lovers and poets with madmen. He thinks the lovers' story of the forest is mere fantasy.

Hippolyta's Response

Hippolyta disagrees:

"But all the story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigured so together, / More witnesseth than fancy's images / And grows to something of great constancy."

She argues that the lovers' shared experience — the fact that they all had the same "dream" — gives it a kind of truth that goes beyond individual fantasy. When many people share the same vision, it "grows to something of great constancy" — it becomes real.

The Play-Within-a-Play (Pyramus and Thisbe)

The mechanicals' performance raises questions about what theatre needs to work:

• The mechanicals are literal-minded: they worry that the audience will think the lion is real, so they write a prologue explaining it is pretend. They worry about showing moonlight, so they have a man hold up a lantern.
• Theseus responds with the key insight: "The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." — All plays are "shadows" (illusions), and what makes theatre work is the audience's imagination, not the quality of the production.

This is Shakespeare's own argument for what he is doing:

• The play we are watching is also a "shadow" — actors on a stage, pretending.
• It works because we agree to imagine — to treat the play as real, to engage with the dream.
• Art (like love and dreams) depends on imagination — the willingness to see something that is not literally there.

Pyramus and Thisbe as Parody

The mechanicals' play is a parody of tragic romance:

• It tells the same story as the main plot (lovers separated by parental opposition) but with a tragic ending.
• It is performed so badly that tragedy becomes comedy — showing how thin the line between the two genres is.
• It is the play's own self-mockery: Shakespeare is showing the audience what his play might look like if it were handled badly.

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How These Themes Connect

Dreams, order vs disorder, and art form a unified exploration of imagination:

• Dreams are private acts of imagination — experiences that feel real but may not be.
• The forest is a dream-space where the normal order dissolves and imagination rules.
• Art (the play itself, Pyramus and Thisbe) is a shared dream — a collective act of imagination.
• Love is also an act of imagination — "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."