A Midsummer Night's Dream Essay

In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, many themes are established throughout the play. Whether it is “true love never runs smooth,” or “power influences relationships,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains lessons that could impact the overall values of one’s life. Nevertheless, there is one particular theme that stands out the most in this play, and it is that “People have different perceptions of reality.” In the play, dreams, magic, and love are all combined to change perspectives, and cause the characters to think differently about their lives. For example, in the play, Puck sees the normal world as full of fools and untrustworthy people, and Theseus is certain that fairies do not exist. These differing perspectives are central

After waking up from a deep sleep influenced by Puck, the fairy, Demetrius mentions the circumstance as “These things seem small and indistinguishable,/Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.” (4.1.191-192). Additionally, a few lines later, Demetrius also states, “Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me /That yet we sleep, we dream.” (4.1.198-200) Demetrius shows that he is confused about reality and what is actually happening in his life. He sees his life as a dream, and he doesn’t know what perspective to look from. At this instance of the play, Demetrius wakes up from a deep sleep after getting influenced by Oberon and the fairies’ magic. When they wake up, they have different concepts and viewpoints on what truly happened to them, as the four lovers are suddenly confused. Demetrius describes the situation as “small and indistinguishable” and he doesn’t know whether he is actually awake. Even though the situation was real, Demetrius was influenced just slightly, and he had a huge change of perspective. This shows that there are always different viewpoints on a situation, it just depends on the angle that it is looked at from, just like Demetrius describing “far-off mountains turned into clouds,” which was only based on the way he saw