"To sleep, perchanse to dream"...can you explain that for me?

Question

"To sleep, perchanse to dream"...can you explain that for me?

Answer 1

He's wondering if there's an afterlife, and if there is...'what dreams may come...' will he get any peace even in death...?

Answer 2

alas poor britishlol i know it not

Answer 3

Hi Brit!

I love this particular monologue from Shakespeare.

Hamlet isn't talking so much about sleeping as he is about the final sleep...death. He is wondering what comes next. The "dream" he is talking about is the final reflections of your life...those final thoughts that pass through your mind, where you weigh your life and see it for what it really was before passing on to what comes next.

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There's the respect " and later in the soliloquoy..."But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of? "

I know you asked specifically about the line "...perchance to dream..." but you can't take the one line out of context, or the entire meaning of the speech is void.

Hamlet was a young man (in that day he was no older than 20!)  just returend from school...we'd say college....while there he studied classic knowldge...including philosophy. This speech of his, that has been interpreted many times as a contemplation of suicide I have always seen it as a speech about raising the courage to go on, to do whats necessary. He's scared, tired, sorrowing...he's seen his fathers ghost, who told him a tale that literally ripped his heart out. He's distraught...he feels he must avenge his father, he's mad at his mother, he hates his uncle...thats enough to make anyone think about death and all it entails. This speech shows his indecision....does he make a plan to avenge or not?

Answer 4

means: But if one sleeps, one may dream - (which may not be pleasant)

the quote of Hamlet goes on to say '.. there's the rub'..meaning there is danger of dreaming all sorts, so that's the thing against sleep/death.

Answer 5

"For who knows, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come".

Hamlet is contemplating suicide, and considering his dilemma, thinking that death might be a release from his current nightmares, which have included the condemnation of his dead father. He gets no peace in his dreams. They cause him agony. So much so that he thinks suicide might be a more peaceful sleep.

"----------------To die, to sleep,

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to"

But he realises that an uncertain life, for all its difficulties, is preferable to killing himself.

He dies in the end, anyway.

Answer 6

It's self-explanatory. You must be thick.

Answer 7

perchance means possibly/perhaps so i assumed it meant sleep for the possibilty or chance of dreaming