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Literature is a dream dreamed for us.
What could be more imaginary than a dream of a dream of a dream? Yet Hermia's dream is just that. She dreams, but later she decides she was dreaming when she dreamed. Then at the very end of A Midsummer Night's Dream we, the audience, are told “You have but slumb'red here”: we dreamed that she dreamed that she dreamed.
A dream of a dream of a dream—surely this is what the comedy describes in the lines that tell how,
as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothingA local habitation and a name.
The psychoanalyst and the literary critic do the same. In our effort to give imaginary dreams “a local habitation and a name,” however, those of us who use psychoanalysis to interpret literature have, historically, used several different approaches. The first is typical of the first phase of psychoanalysis: we would use Hermia's dream as an illustration of someone's unconscious made conscious. In the second phase, we would place her dream within a system of ego functions. Finally—today—we would use this airy nothing to symbolize ourselves to ourselves.