In "Young Goodman Brown," was Brown's experience in the forest a dream or a reality?

Hawthorne's tales inhabit a middle ground between illusion and reality. The reader
often cannot be sure if the action is presented as something actually occurring, if it is a
dream or hallucinatory experience, or if it is somehow all of the above. This ambiguity is a
central theme of Romantic (especially Dark Romantic) literature, and it is
an extension of the nineteenth-century view of man as a being who essentially creates a reality
of his own through the power of his mind. As in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, one of
Hawthorne's contemporaries, there is no simple answer to the question of dream vs. reality in
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Hawthorne's personal religious beliefs are open to
interpretation, but by his time, even most devout Christians probably no longer believed that
Satan or the Devil was an actual being who took human form and visited people on earth. The
story of Goodman Brown meeting the mysterious stranger in the woods is a, a metaphorical
representation of the...