What is a Dream? Essay -- Literary Analysis, Shakespeare, Carroll

Your eyelids are heavy and your mind is fogging, finally they close entirely with the weight of the eyelids, and in a few minutes you have fallen into slumber. You wake up with a vivid image in your mind, but you have no clue as to what it means: it was just a dream. A dream, some may argue is irrelevant; images assorted together creating nonsense. Others depict a dream as a message our mind is telling us. Throughout the day, the mind subconsciously picks up pieces of our daily life, whether they are thoughts, emotions, ideas, or interactions. The brain naturally resists chaos and is attuned to order and organization and, therefore, sees past the commotion and malfunctions, it begins to matrix things, such as images in the clouds. It is through dreaming that these images sort out all the confusion in the ordinary daily life and reveals a bizarre and unrealistic world, which is a reflection of the unstable reality that is actually lived in. Reality is considered unstable because it is constantly changing, moving and transforming into something else whether people are aging, dying or being born. It is a constantly changing factor that people refuse to accept, and it is in our dreams that it is revealed. It is in this dream world where William Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll use fantastical characters, such as fairies and the White Rabbit to exemplify the daily interactions one must make to seek the truth. It is in the court and woods where everything is turned upside down, and where what is right is wrong, and what one knows, are no longer relevant. Ultimately these dreams illustrate the absence of time within these worlds. The dream process plays an essential function in both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Carroll’s Alic... ...nuously move to get somewhere and when they find they are looking for, they still have to keep going. The characters met through the journey represent the logical and illogical strangers that people face every day and some may help while others might pull them down. These interactions are significant because every interaction and actions affect a person even if it is not all that clear. Time is the biggest factor in how reality is unstable. No matter what a person does, time is constantly there, and every second is a second past. The main reason it is not stable is because it is always changing and moving and whether one likes it or not, no one can change time. In a dream, time is not a factor and characters met can have no significance and in a dream, just for those few hours, the world can be a perfect and stable place, at least just until it is time to wake up.