August Strindberg A Dream Play

August Strindberg A Dream Play
"child of my greatest pain"

On April 17 1907 'A Dream Play' was performed for the first time. A note in his diary on the same day shows how he felt about the play: he calls it "my most beloved play, the child of my greatest pain". A Dream Play was written in the autumn of 1901, when Strindberg had recently married Harried Bosse. But the dream of marital happiness is momentarily crushed when Harriet leaves home "forever". Strindberg suffers alone for forty days, reaching the conclusion that life is an illusion that never fulfils our dreams. At the end of the year the play was finished.
A Dream Play was maybe the first drama to employ a dream-like reality as a genre-in-itself. Traditionally plays have incorporated scenes illustrating dreams or nightmares, but none have based an entire play around them. By doing this, Strindberg abandoned conventional perceptions of time and space. He had reduced his original theme, of the man waiting vainly at the theatre for his fiancee who never comes, to a sub plot; his chief character now was Indra's Daughter, the child of a god who is sent by her father to live among mortals. She meets and marries a poor man's lawyer, who spends his life vainly trying to right the wrongs of humanity; so she endures the agonies of human existence until, at last, she puts off mortal flesh and returns to her father.

Strindberg's third wife Harriet Bosse in A Dream Play

The song of the winds

Earth is not clean
life is not good
men are not evil
nor are they good
they live as they can
a day at a time
The sons of dust
in dust must wander
Born of dust
To dust they return
they were given feet to plod
Not wings.
Is the fault theirs
or yours?

From A Dream Play

In a short foreword to A Dream Play, August Strindberg explained his intention with the play:

"In this dream play, the author has, as in his former dream play, To Damascus, attempted to imitate the inconsequent yet transparently logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality , the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.
The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble.But one consciousness rules over them all, that of the dreamer; for him there are no secrets, no scruples, no laws. He neither acquits nor condemns, but merely relates; and, just as a dream is more often painful than happy, so an undertone of melancholy and of pity for all mortal beings accompanies this flickering tale."

Below what Strindberg wrote in his Diary the day when A Dream Play appeared in the theatre.

"Am reading about the teachings of Indian religions. The whole world is but an illusion (= Humbug or relative meaninglessness). The divine Primary Force (MahamAtna, Tad, Aum, Brahma) let itself be seduced by Maya or the impulse of procreation. In this the Divine Primary Element sinned against itself. (Love is sin; that is why pangs of love are the greatest hell that exists.)
Thus the world exists only through sin, if it exists at all, for it is only a dream picture (hence my Dream Play is a picture of life), a phantom the destruction of which is the mission of the ascetic. But this mission conflicts with the instinct of love, and the sum of it all is a ceaseless wavering between sensuality and the pangs of remorse. This seems to me the answer to the riddle of life . . . All day I read Buddhism."

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