Don Quixote has spent so much time reading courtly romances about knights and their ladies that it has addled the middle-aged man's mind, and, we are told, made him crazy. Whether or not he really is crazy becomes one of the open-ended questions the book never fully resolves, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.
Whatever the case, Quixote finds the everyday world too dull and lacking in opportunities for glory and valor. He therefore decides to "be the change he wants to see," to use a modern phrase, and refashions himself as a knight errant. A knight needs a lady to defend, impress, and honor, so Quixote finds one in the form of a sturdy, loud-voiced, strong, and "manly" peasant "lass" named Aldonza Lorenzo. In his imagination, Quixote decides a knight such as him can have no less than a princess as his lady, so a princess she becomes. He renames her Dulcinea, which means sweet. He decides she is a fragile lady with golden hair. Making fun of stereotypical descriptions of beautiful women, Cervantes has Quixote assign Dulcinea eyes like suns, eyebrows like rainbows, alabaster skin, pearl teeth, and coral lips—more like a plaster doll than a real person.
Dulcinea, though Quixote identifies her with Aldonza, is a make-believe character. Since she is left behind as Quixote sallies forth on his adventures, he can imagine her as he wishes. Despite her fictive nature, she inspires Quixote to many feats of courage and daring-do. She shows the importance of having ideals to live for and the way a dream can motivate us to action.
As a part of Don Quixote's delusions that he is a knight-errant living a life straight out of one of his favorite books, he believes he must have a lady love motivating his actions and to whom he can dedicate his "heroic" deeds. Quixote fixates on a woman called (at least in Quixote's head) Dulcinea del Toboso. In reality, her name is Aldonza Lorenzo and, though Quixote describes her as "a princess" and a rare beauty, she is in fact just a local woman, of common birth, who is not even particularly aware of Don Quixote's existence.
So, in short, Don Quixote needs a "lady love" to fulfill the requirements of the genre to which he is trying to shape his life. What is significant about Dulcinea, the woman he chooses, is that she is not actually anything like the highborn, stunning, elegant woman Quixote builds her up to be in his own mind.
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