The Color Yellow
The unnamed young wife’s favorite color is yellow. Psychologically, yellow is a color symbolizing intellectual desire. Yellow is associated with logical analysis and rationality. Ironically, the woman whose favorite color is yellow spends the entire story running desperately away from interpretive exploration of her dream and subconscious anxieties.
“It was all very comforting.”
The narrator describes the wife and her husband, John, as sharing a remarkably similar outlook on everything. The paragraph inexorably makes it way toward concluding their “value systems were as assured and tidy as the Holiday Inn at which they were staying.” The final punctuation is the assertion of how much comfort this aspect of their relationship is to the wife. That is a statement of conscious awareness. Later, the wife will have a panic attack as it is revealed that subconsciously she actually this tidiness completely the opposite.
Final Irony
The story ends on an ironic note. Earlier, that aspect sharing the same outlook is displayed when each agrees on which wedding gifts to keep, consider and jettison. Among those to be jettisoned is a Blue Mountain pottery. In the final image, she is seen writing thank-you note to the person gifted them the pottery, writing how much she and John both love it.
Portrait of a Perfect Wife
The new bride’s conscious fantasy of a perfect wife is comprehensively described in a single line: “She pictured herself bent over a sewing machine stitching yellow gingham curtains while stew bubble in the yellow enamel pot on the stove.” The fantasy extends to describing how John arrives home every night by way of the subway. It is an image distinctly out of sync with the changing times, sepia-toned photograph from not just a different world, but the media construction of the myth of that world. Later, when her anxieties bubble to the surface, what she fears most will look, ironically, very similar.
Dream Analysis
This entire story—all five pages of it—are designed to create for the reader a situation in which they take on the role of a psychoanalyst. It opens with a description of a dream and then proceeds to provide relevant information about the dreamer which is introduced like the background details that a patient would relate to a psychologist for the purpose of interpretation. By titling the “Dreams” the author seems to be rather clearly urging readers to put two and two together and seem if it comes up four. Whether it comes or some other number is absolutely beside the point. What the author seems interested in is not that conclusion is drawn from the dream interpretation, but that readers find the motivation to just naturally do it. This stands in starkly ironic contrast to both John and his wife who utterly and comprehensively dismiss both the value and desire to analyze the dream to uncover some hidden or secret meaning.
