Was the story of "Young Goodman Brown" a dream or a reality to Brown? Explain why you think so.

The events that take
place in this short story might have been a dream, but they certainly do not feel that way to
young Goodman Brown himself. After Brown begs Faith, his wife, to resist the devil, he finds
himself all alone in the dark forest. He returns to the village, a changed man from the one he
was just the evening before, and the narrator asks,

Had
Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be
it so, if you will.

We, the readers, can tell ourselves
that it was a dream if we prefer, but Goodman Brown does not seem to think of his experiences as
a dream. He acts as though he believes that the events took place in reality. "A stern, a
sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become [...]." When
Brown sees Goody Cloyse with a little girl, he "snatched away the child, as from the grasp
of the fiend himself." He...