Dreams

Pain and misery. That's the stuff dreams are made of. Especially in this novel.

For Slocum, dreams are somewhat a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they offer an escape from the monotony of his real life. But on the other hand, they are scary, and they cause him a lot of angst.

Dreams are an opportunity for Slocum to either revisit his past or imagine a life that's not his own. He can relive his army days and the time when he and his wife were young, and he can picture a life without Derek. However, his dreams also haunt him: his memories of Virginia, for example, torment him with thoughts of missed opportunity. He also dreams that a prized part of his body (we'll let you guess what) has either shrunk or been removed—much to his horror.

Dreams in this novel frequently blur with reality; Slocum sometimes has a difficult time distinguishing which is which. We're told in the beginning that Slocum fears opening pantry doors and finding mice, because that's exactly what happened to him in his New York apartment several years back. Yet when he tells this story a second time, his wife interrupts to tell him that it wasn't a mouse that he found, but a cockroach. Is Slocum confusing dreams with reality?

We wouldn't be surprised. The fact is that the reality Slocum lives in is kind of a dream. Everything is pretty much meaningless, and people go around with masks on all the time, masking their despair—until they finally crack and either go bonkers or kill themselves. Maybe Slocum's dreams are actually more real than his actual reality?