SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Dream-Stuff: A Forerunner of Freud's 'Dream Material'," in American Imago, Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter, 1986, pp. 335-55.

In the following essay, Rubinstein explores the dream language and imagery of Shakespeare's dramas and the relation of these to Freudian psychoanalysis.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

The Tempest, IV.i

"Sleep, thou hast been a grandsire, and begot / A father to me; and thou hast created / A mother . . . Gone! they went hence as soon as they were born; / And so I am awake . . . and find nothing. 'Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmen / Tongue and brain not; either both or nothing; / Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such / As sense cannot untie. Be what it is / The action of my life is like it . . ."

Cymbeline, V.iv¹

What Freud calls the "material" of dreams...