How would I track the motif of dreams/reality in A Midsummer Night's Dream? Could you tell me what I need to find with an example in text?My...

I expect that your teacher wants you to look through the
play and find any mention of the motif of "dreams," providing quotations that support
the essence of dreams because they are central to the plot of the play. I can give you
some examples.

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream, the entire plot surrounds the "dreams" the young Athenian
lovers seem to experience in the woods one evening, and the dreams of Titania and Bottom
(with his ass's head).

The Elizabethan audience believed
without question in the supernatural. Shakespeare is probably single-handedly
responsible for portraying fairies in a positive light, where before they were
considered malevolent characters. This audience also firmly believed that the woods
belonged to the fairy realm after dark: to be caught there meant that one might be at
the mercy of "fairy magic."

Dreams are a large part of the
play. There are two sets of main characters: the two pairs of Athenian lovers who travel
into the woods, and Titania and Oberon, the Queen and King of the fairies. When the
Athenian lovers meet in the woods, they will fall asleep twice. When they wake the
second time, the antics of the fairies in their lives have ended, and all has been
restored between the lovers as Oberon has seen fit. They all wake and feel as if they
had been dreaming, though they have really lived what they think
was only a dream.

While Oberon and Titania fight over a
changeling child that a dead friend of Titania left in the Queen's care, Titania falls
asleep and Puck puts a spell on her. He changes Bottom the weaver, a potential actor for
the Duke's upcoming nuptials, into a creature with the head of an ass (donkey). When
Titania awakes, she falls in love with him, much to the amusement of Oberon and
Puck.

Ultimately, when Bottom is returned to his natural
state and awakes, he comments on what he perceives to be extraordinary
dreams:

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.

………

The eye of man hath
not heard, the ear of

man hath not seen; man's hand is not
able

to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor
his

heart to report, what my dream was.

(IV.i.205-214)

When the
Athenian lovers awake, they also think they have had incredible
dreams. They cannot explain what has happened to them, but after Hermia's father and the
Duke have left, they discuss their experiences.

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DEMETRIUS:

Are
you sure (195)

That we are awake? It seems to
me

That yet we sleep, we dream. Do not you
think

The Duke was here, and bid us follow
him?

And
then...

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DEMETRIUS:

Why,
then, we are awake; let's follow him;

And by the way let us
recount our dreams.

The idea
of dreams to explain the extraordinary experiences allow the characters to dismiss the
reality of what has happened to them, and to dismiss the presence of the fairies in the
woods that night. Oberon and Titania make-up, and their only concern is the well-being
of the human world. The sense of dreams may also introduce the concept that a thin veil
separates this world and another imaginary one. Shakespeare has, in fact, created two
different worlds.

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...more than just a dream-world, the realm that
Shakespeare creates...is the world of
imagination.