Impending death
In "The Death of Robert Browning," the protagonist somehow knows that he is going to die, due to certain symbols. The narrator writes that "the idea had been with him for some time- two or three months at least. He was no a man to ignore symbols, especially when they carried personal messages. Now he had to acknowledge that the symbols were in the air as surely as winter."
Dreams
In the story "Dreams," the protagonist has strange "wedding-night" dreams, of which one is about a wheel-chair. When she wakes up she explains the dream to her husband, in which "all the men she had known in her relatively short life had been presented to her in a series... they were all in wheelchairs." John doesn't believe that the dream has an symbolic significance, and writes it off as "absurd and therefore boring." However, this dream does not only have symbolic significance for the protagonist regarding her relationships with the men in her life, but also has a wider significance in Urquhart's collection of short stories.
