A dream

A dream – I’m pretty sure that’s when it first entered my head.

Sometimes you wake up from a dream with a phrase or sequence of words still reverberating around in your brain. It might even take a while to realize it’s been nestled there for hours, lurking somewhere in the back of your thoughts. Today I realized that for the entire day a little snatch of dialog from a play by Shakespeare had been rattling around in my mind, just ever so slightly out of conscious awareness, apparently a last remnant from a dream of the night before.

Now, in the quiet of the evening, after the hubbub of the day has subsided, I realize what it was – one of my favorite speeches from “The Tempest”, spoken by Prospero in the first scene of Act IV. It’s an odd – and oddly beautiful – little monologue. Ostensibly he is speaking about the artifice of the play we are watching, observing that what we have seen here is nothing but illusion, papier-mâché and greasepaint. And so he starts out:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:

But then Prospero continues, and the impact of his words carry far beyond the stage proscenium:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

This is so much lovelier and deeper than the famous monologue in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” that begins “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”. That passage speaks only to the tragicomic pageant of an individual life, whereas the speech from “The Tempest” is nearer to the Hindu concept of Maya – that this apparently solid world we perceive around us is in fact only an illusion. Shakespeare is suggesting that the very fabric of reality around us may itself be only a sort of fleeting and illusory performance. The sentiment reminds me quite a bit of this dourly playful excerpt from Fitzgerald’s translation of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (the original was written in 1120 in Persia):

For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

It’s a profound idea, and yet one which many of us first encountered in early childhood:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

🙂