Missing Persons; Or, the Marriage of True Minds

It seems natural to think of the theater as the theater thinks of itself, as interchangeable with dream. The stagings of the unconscious are similarly duplicitous; they to be doing one thing but are really doing another. The theatricality of dream is what we remember, the hallucinatory events which seem to be wholly happening. We tend to forget, however, what is being dramatized, the dreamthoughts played out in visual and acoustic images. In dreams, says Freud, we appear not to think but to experience.... Not until we wake up does the critical comment arise that we have not experienced anything but have merely been thinking in a peculiar way, or in other words dreaming.' In theater, we often favor the dreaming for the wrong reasons. We put the premium on experience and thereby ignore the nature of dreams. According to Brecht's critical comment, we are still digesting our dinners and prefer not to wake up and think. Or we muse over the baseless fabric of Prospero's revels, forgetting that his brain is troubled (Tmp. IV.1.148-59). Even in the Epilogue--paranoia seemingly in love and forgiveness-the ending is despair unless relieved by prayer (11. 15-16). The old brain of Freud told us, without a hedge of romance, just how unlikely that is. The Tempest is an early

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