From the first time I read The Tempest and came across the famous line “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” I understood that for Shakespeare, a dream was never just a fleeting allegory. It was a key. A crack in the wall that led backstage into the soul. Dreams populate his plays with almost magical symbolic power—sometimes prophetic, sometimes deceptive, always revealing. But more than a plot device or poetic flourish, dreams in the Shakespearean universe speak of us: our fears, ambitions, guilt, and delusions.

Of course, Shakespeare didn’t invent dreams as a literary expression. But few writers have used them with such complexity. From tragedies to comedies, dreams appear as visions, premonitions, moral justifications, and even as battlegrounds between desire and reason. In Hamlet, for instance, it’s impossible to ignore the philosophical weight of the line “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…” The Prince of Denmark, contemplating suicide, reveals that the true fear of death is not the end itself but what we might dream in that eternal sleep. Life may be unbearable, but the uncertainty of what comes after—that dream that might await us beyond death—paralyzes. Dreaming here offers no comfort; it is an abyss.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on“

Tempest

This ambivalence runs through the entire body of work. In Julius Caesar, Calpurnia dreams of Caesar’s death and warns him. A dream that might have changed the course of history. But, as in so many tragedies, the feminine premonition is dismissed—reduced to hysteria—and fate takes its course. In Macbeth, dreams are ruled by guilt and delirium. “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!” cries the protagonist after committing the murder that will secure him the throne. From then on, sleep—and therefore dreams—become impossible. The guilty mind is condemned to insomnia. Lady Macbeth, in turn, dreams while awake, obsessively washing her hands in what we could call a traumatic, sleepwalking breakdown. Madness breaches sleep, as if the unconscious finally demands its due.

But not all is shadow. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dreams take on playful and desirous shapes. The dream-world of the forest is a space where anything is possible: exchanged passions, confused identities, suspended realities. In the end, Puck invites us to believe it was all just a dream: “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended: that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.” There’s a deep irony here: theater as a collective dream. The stage is a bed where the audience lies down and projects itself. More than enchantment, there is critique—and awareness of artifice.

“To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub“
Hamlet

In fact, it’s striking how Shakespeare links dreams and illusion with theater and truth. In The Tempest, Prospero declares: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Everything is transient, everything is performance—including existence itself. As the play ends, Prospero bids farewell not just to the audience, but to the very art of theater: a magician hanging up his cloak, a playwright drawing the curtain. Once again, the dream marks both an ending and a beginning.

Today, it’s impossible not to reread these passages through a psychoanalytic lens. Centuries before Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Shakespeare had already intuited the symbolic and traumatic power of the unconscious. His characters don’t dream of fairies or mythological creatures, but of inner fears, irreparable losses, and repressed ambitions. In Shakespeare’s work, dreams reveal fractures in the self. Desire is exposed but never fully resolved. Instead of offering answers, dreams deepen the doubt—and that’s what makes them so profoundly human.

That’s also why Shakespeare’s dream-related lines remain popular, quoted in films, series, books, and speeches. Phrases like “To sleep, perchance to dream” or “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” have been printed on posters, tattooed on skin, spoken at weddings and funerals. More than beautiful words, they are poetic syntheses of the human condition. Of our hesitations. Of our capacity to imagine another world—or to fear it.

In an era of distorted realities, where dreams are often confused with fake news, Shakespeare’s reflections on the boundaries between the real and the imagined sound as relevant as ever. Perhaps that’s why the Bard keeps dreaming with us. Or rather, keeps making us dream with him. And showing us that dreaming, far from being an escape, is a mirror—distorted, enchanted, and necessary.