With his pioneering A Dream Play Strindberg set the tone for the drama to come. The play shows how the Daughter of Indra, the Indian god, visits the earth in order to find out whether the complaints of humanity are justified. As little Agnes, the daughter of a glazier, she takes human form. Standing before the beautiful “growing castle,” representing earthly life, she is amazed at its beauty. In a series of scenes, she meets various representatives of mankind, all of them suffering, yet hoping for a change for the better. Many of them appear in the theatre corridor, like the world itself a place of illusion. Three characters are prominent in the play: the Officer who endlessly keeps waiting in the corridor for his beloved Victoria, an opera singer; the Lawyer who tries to help those who suffer injustices; and the Poet who seeks to be in touch with higher, spiritual values. Married to the Lawyer, the Daughter gives birth to a child. Feeling imprisoned with a husband who does not share her needs, she escapes with the Poet, first to Foulstrand, an earthly hell, then to Fairhaven – only to discover that suffering applies there too. Back in the theatre corridor she witnesses how the four deans of the university manage to get the door that is said to hide the riddle of the world, opened – only to discover that there is nothing behind it. Back in front of the growing castle, she witnesses how a number of the characters she has earlier met sacrifice their most treasured properties to the fire. Before entering the castle, now burning, to return to her heavenly Father, she promises mankind to “bear their complaints to the throne.”

Loosely imitating the form of a dream to evoke the feeling that life is a dream, the play lacks the traditional division of acts and scenes;1 also, there is no list of dramatis personae.

When the play was first published it lacked the Prologue that was probably added shortly before the world premiere in 1907. Since then the Prologue has sometimes been included, sometimes excluded in performances.