Monday, September 20, 2010

DreamZzZzZzZzzz...


Dreams. They're everywhere and they seem to be one of the few things that humans still haven't been able to fully understand. Some people think of dreams as the way our subconscious desires are made tangible, others think of dreams as the means by which we are given messages from beyond the grave. Everyone interprets their dreams differently and we can see in The Road that the father interprets his dreams as a type of warning. On page 18, Cormac McCarthy writes, "He (father) said that the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and else was the call of languor and of death." We can see that in his situation, the Father had to interpret his dreams as warnings in order to stay alert in the world that he lived in.

You can also find the giving of importance to dreams in The Giver, written by Lois Lowry. In the book, Jonas is a 12 year old boy that lives in a utopia where everything is state-controlled and there is no space for any type of free-will to be exercised. For Jonas' family, a daily routine was "dreamtelling." This happened every morning at breakfast where all of the members of the family told their dreams and then as a family, they "discussed (...) the warning the dream had given." In the novel, the people would have to take daily pills that would control the amount of dreams that they would have.

As we can see, dreams play a crucial role for us as creatures. Whether they are some type of fortune-whispering natural phenomenon or whether they are a simple window into our subconscious, we may never know.

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