Psychoanalysis
A section on imagery without a description of the dream imagery that makes up the most significant aspect of a story titled “Dream” would seem pretty vacant. And so here it is. The primary imagery of significance about the dream which ends when the dreamer cries out “Don’t forget your seatbelts!” What is going on here, narratively speaking, is pretty self-evidence. Or at least it should prove to be by the time the reader completes the story. Neither the dreamer nor her husband—or the third person narrator—makes even the slightest attempt at decoding the meaning of the dream. The author has put the reader into the role of the psychoanalyst. All the clues will be provided to make solid determination, so pay close attention.
“They were all in wheelchairs, but such wheelchairs! Suspended on thin strong ropes they gave their occupants the opportunity to swing back and forth against a clear blue sky. The men involved had look to her like strange trapeze artists or happy preschool children on playground swings. They were having, it appeared, a wonderful time. Then, for reasons unknown even to herself, the cautionary business of the seatbelts had grabbed her vocal cords.”
Legs
One of the more explicitly offered clues provided by the reader over the course of this very short story is an unusually detailed penetration of the thought processes of the bride on a subject that hardly seems worthy. One might assume she merely has a sort of fetishistic thing going here, but the author surrounds the tangential information with one very meaningful nugget proving quite useful in interpreting her dream:
“She was always surprised by the response that the sight of a naked pair of male legs awoke in her...They were holy territory…perfectly fabricated systems…to carry primitive hunters quietly and swiftly through some complicated forest. Now they carried John across the land…along the frothy edge of the sea. Later…they would carry him through the labyrinth of street and subway to an office every weekday for the rest of his life.”
A Strange Interlude
The story is intensely focused upon two characters. Insight into the thinking processes is limited to the unnamed bride with the implication being that John’s thought processes are hardly worth the effort. This narrow constriction of narrative focus makes the one single moment when that concentration is broken stand out all the more. At first glance, it may see a lapse in authorial control or possibly even an editorial mistake resulting from multiple rewrites. Closer scrutiny reveals, however, that this strange break in the tight focus upon the main characters serves the thematic impetus of story as an examination of psychological repression and suppression of active pursuit of information:
“The desk clerk smiled benignly as they passed through the lobby, his face altering to the odd grimace of a man barely able to suppress a wink. He was aware of their honeymoon status. She remembered passing through similar lobbies of similar hotels with men she had not been married to. The desk clerks there had remained tactfully aloof, the situation being less easy to classify.”
A Hostile Takeover
As she sits on the hotel terrace writing thank-you notes, the bride’s attention is drawn to her husband’s decision to go for a swim in the ocean. The note-writing intent of her conscious mind is briefly the target of a hostile takeover by her repressed subconscious. All her anxieties that she works both consciously and unconsciously to tamp back down rise to her actively thinking mind and for brief few moments she becomes paralyzed victim, forced to confront and admit the deepest fears she expends so much energy on in the pursuit of distractions to ensure they remain repressed.
“She would study the predictable repetitious motions of the waves surrounding him until, with a kind of slow horror, she would realize that the organized behavior of the Atlantic was what the rest of her life would be, one week following another, expectations fulfilled in easy categories, and the hypnotic monotony of predictable responses. Oh, my God, she would think briefly—why does he seem to be having such a good time?”
