“Abu Hassan; or, The Sleeper Awakened,” in The Arabian Nights (ca. 1000 c.e.), is the tale of a wise young man who exhausts half his inheritance on ungrateful friends and then befriends the caliph Haroon al Rashid, who is disguised as a merchant. The caliph drugs Abu Hassan and has him conveyed to the palace and made to believe that he is the caliph. When he is returned to his own home, Abu Hassan's friends think that he has become a madman, and he becomes entirely confused about what is real and what is not. The story is an obvious precursor to Life Is a Dream.

Oedipus Rex (ca. 425 b.c.e.), the first play in Sophocles' Theban trilogy—Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone—tells the story of a man who, as an infant, survives exposure on a...