Author Terry Brooks wrote that “your focus determines your reality” (241). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (MND) by William Shakespeare and Young Goodman Brown (YGB) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, we are presented with evidence of the differences between illusion and reality. Every day we dance between the light and dark elements of our own souls. In our personal “inscape” (Kaul 1), we can find the source of our reality where each of us harbors a secret, buried nature. Dreams are “a name for the world out of which man emerges into conscious life, the world of the unconscious as we have a habit of calling it today” (Goddard 40). In MND, Shakespeare takes us on a light-hearted jaunt, mainly through one character named Nick Bottom, into his own
Point of view and perception are important in any communication. For instance, when reading YGB and MND, we must consider the “light in which the events happen to be placed” (Lang 89). When we see or perceive something, we frequently refer to it as being “in light of” or “the light in which”. In Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, a definition of the word light includes “in the light of considering—[to] see the light (of day) 1. to come into being 2. to come into public view [to bring new facts to light] 3. to understand [and] 9. aspect [viewed in another light]”. In each story, reason and empirical action begin in the daylight and end in the daylight because “the realm of imagination is the
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