IN SHAKESPEARE's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom, upon awakening from his disturbing experience among the fairies, says, ‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. … The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (IV.i.209–10, 214–17). Bottom's lack of awareness about almost anything is comically apparent here, where he misidentifies the senses which, should they be applied to understanding his dream, would fail to comprehend it. In spite of its comic and confusing nature, this quotation works well to define, to some extent, what makes dreams and visions so very difficult to categorize and to recognize based on traditional methods. Dreams are complicated because they represent extensions of the unconscious, desires which make us uncomfortable when we are conscious and participating in our regular lives. Still, the wishes we fulfill in our dreams, however uncomfortable they may make us feel when we dream them, are genuine to some extent, in spite of, as Freud writes, their ‘strangeness and obscurity’.

In medieval literature, the genre of the dream vision is wrapped up closely with that of mysticism because both deal with experiences which occur outside of human consciousness. Most scholars who address these two genres see them separately. Mysticism, for example, is seen by most who study it as a physical (or at least sensual) phenomenon, based on a specific experience of transcendence, and experienced differently based on a mystic’s gender and social role. Traditional definitions of mysticism generally view it as a process that is achieved through successful completion of either the via negativa or what has become known as the via mystica, a three-tiered process combining prayer, contemplation, and meditation.