As Shakespeare's Hamlet has the theme of appearance versus reality, A Midsummer's Night Dream displays the theme of fantasy versus reality. We can even see the theme of dreams in the title; the characters cannot seem to figure out if all of the happenings existed or if they were dreams. Fantasy in this play is represented through the alternate fairy world.
The fairy world and the human world exist harmoniously, but separately. Also, the humans are unaware of their existence due to the fact that they "work their magic" at night. For example, the character Puck is the trickster of the play, and he gives the mortals potions, amongst other magic, that make the characters say and do things out of the norm for their particular character. Also, both realms have similar conflicts regarding love. However, since the fairy world is essentially regarded as the dream world, this creates conflict when the dream world interferes with real world perceptions of events.
Within both the fairy and human realms, love is out of balance. When we are introduced to the fairy realm in Act 2, we observe that how Oberon and Titania have confusion in their relationship because both of them feel betrayed. As a result, Oberon has Puck put a magic flower potion on Titania's eyes while she is asleep, makign her hall in love with the first person she sees when she awakes. The same is also done to Lysander's eyes, which creates a huge problem when he awakes to see Helena. To counteract all of the problems that inevitably arose from this, he adds the juice to the other characters' eyelids. Here, we can see this as being problematic because the fantasy world augments and creates a false sense of reality for the characters. In the end, the tension between all of the love triangles is resolved through the use of magic.
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