“Don’t forget your seatbelts! Don’t forget your seatbelts!”
This the cry in the middle of their wedding night from the bride which awakens both her and her husband. The dream features a cast of former lovers all sitting in wheelchairs suspended in mid-air which they swing back and forth like a trapeze artist. The newly wedded husband actually determines this dream to be “boring” and goes back to sleep. Only once more will he mention it and then it is only to inquire why they were in wheelchair. She has no idea, dismissive of it herself as merely dream logic. She also cannot explain exactly what stimulated the passionate cry to remember the seatbelts. The reaction to the dream of both of these characters will essentially be the foundation for the rest of the story even though the dream itself only gets mentioned that one later mention formulated as a half-interested puzzlement about the wheelchairs.
Yellow was her favorite color, so all of the yellow paraphernalia slipped easily into the “lovely” category. The steadily increasing profusion of yellow objects had been, in fact, a great comfort to her in the week or so preceding the wedding.
Although yellow is commonly associated with an overly optimistic attitude, it is actually a color with psychological symbolism deeply steeped in rationality, intellect and logic. Yellow is a color often used in décor to stimulate an atmosphere of mental activity with studies noting it is especially valuable in workplaces demanding analytical thinking. It is a color also prove to stimulate an emotional response of well-being that reduces anxiety. Since the entire form and structure of this exercise in minimalist writing is to avoid explicitly offering too much information so as to coerce the reader into critical thinking that makes associations between what is stated and what is not, the full implication of the psychology of yellow won’t be further outlined. The significant thing to understand is that much of the information the author did deem worthy of explicitly handing to the reader is descriptions containing important symbolic states in psychology or dream analysis.
“Who knows? Who ever knows in dreams?”
This quote is in response to the only expression of interest John ever really shows in his wife’s bizarre dream. It is response to his single inquisition, a brief pondering over why the old boyfriends happened to be situated in wheelchairs, directed absently while smoking a post-coital cigarette before both drifted lazily off to sleep. Neither partner is apparently interrupted by dreams during this slumber. Earlier, the narrator has shared the important information that they share the same attitudes and opinions toward almost everything: from taste in music to taste in cocktails to which wedding gifts to keep and which to dispose. They also seem to share another common quality: a lack of desire to penetrate too deeply into the subconscious or, at the very least, subjects with the potential to become unpleasant. Ultimately, it is this shared component that the story is really about. Except that it is known by a precise term in psychology: repression. Repression that is helped along significantly by conscious suppression.
