Assess the role and significance of dreams in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that centres on the dichotomy of authority and order and the power of nature and sexuality, these themes can be illuminated through the conceptual schema of Freud's interpretation of dreams. Dreams in the play function as a mediating force between these two worlds. The play begins with the four lovers, Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius, fleeing from the restrictions and impositions of society in Athens and fleeing into the forest. This is the 'green world' trope in Shakespeare that marks a transition to a place of disrupted order and hierarchy. There is much speculation about where the dreams begin and end in the play and it is one of Shakespeare's "strategic opacities". However, thematically there is much firmer ground to associate the forest scenes with dreaming from a Freudian perspective. The culture of Athens is a controlling superego but the dream allows nature to bypass the censoring and restrictive forces of culture. Emma Smith describes the play as "insistently sexual" through references to bestiality in the transformation of bottom, Helena's dream of a snake and the curious choice of word "deflower" with reference to a pursuing lion. All of these incidents take place in the dreamscape of the play and they strongly suggest a repressed Id being communicated through dreaming. Some argue that these references to sexuality are more opaque than in other plays by Shakespeare. Hamlet or Titus Andronicus are considerably more explicit and therefore a better fit for the Freudian interpretation. However, a part of the Freudian theory is that the sexual expression is coded so as not to offend the superego. In that sense the relative obscurity of these references to sexuality makes the play a deeply Freudian examination of the tension of order in society and the chaotic repressed contents of the Id.
Some characters seem at war with their Id from the moment they enter the dreamscape-forest. Hermia insists to Lysander that he "sleep a little farther away". This insistence is repeated emphatically so as to underline the anxiety of maintaining sexual boundaries in the unbounded world of the forest, a world in which dreams and reality comingle and reality seems to lack any demarcated structure or laws. At the end of the play Theseus meets the lovers of the forest and in a grand dismissive sweep tries to brush off their account of the night's events as idle fancy. An emissary of the Athenian superego has arrived to establish order after the dream has ended. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact", the essence of the dreamscape has been summed up and dismissed in one sentence as order is restored in the classic formula of comic endings. In spite of this returning order to the waking world, Shakespeare does not give Theseus the final words of the play. Rather they are given to the mysterious and chaotic fairy Robin Goodfellow, "if we spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended...". There is in this final reversal a suggestion that the chaotic forces of nature and sexuality will not be so easily kept at bay or dismissed by Theseus. There is, in this, a final triumph of the "Dionysian earth cult" as Paglia construes the tensions of the dreaming world and the waking world of A Midsummer Night's Dream