Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Bad Dreams, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Imagination
Secrecy
Gender and Freedom
Summary
Analysis
A nine-year-old girl wakes up, disoriented, in her dark bedroom. As she looks around her, the familiar shapes of her bedroom emerge from the darkness. She’s lying on the top bunk, with her younger brother sleeping in the bunk below, in a small basement apartment where her parents are also asleep in their own room.
The story begins with its protagonist, the young girl, feeling disoriented, which suggests that the night on which this story takes place will be a transformative one for her—one that changes her perceptions of the world around her.
Themes
The girl feels like something bad happened while she was asleep, but she remembers that it happened in her dream. She dreamed that she was reading her favorite book, Swallows and Amazons, which she and her friends at school like to reenact. In her dream, she discovered an epilogue in the book that she’d never seen before. The epilogue listed the mundane struggles and deaths the characters went on to have after the book finished, except for Susan, the most boring character, who lived a long life.
The girl has a vibrant imagination which gives her comfort and allows her to enjoy her friends’ company, but her nightmare demonstrates that her imagination can also frighten her. It’s a potent force. It’s clear here, too, that the girl treasures the idea of adventure, and it’s the idea of a mundane adult life, as well as mortality, that scares her.
Themes
Even though the girl knows the book’s epilogue only exists in her dream, its horror stays with her. She doesn’t call out to her mother like she used to after a bad dream: she doesn’t want to describe it out loud and make it feel even realer, or for her mother to laugh at her. She feels alone in her own home for the first time. She climbs out of bed.
The girl opens her bedroom door. She sees the moonlight illuminating the iron lampshade in the hall, making it look “as barbaric as a cage.” In the kitchen, everything is tidy. The girl’s mother’s sewing machine and the cut pieces of fabric have been neatly put away.
The girl’s comparison of the lampshade to a cage implies that she feels trapped in the apartment, or that it threatens her in some way. Furthermore, the girl seems to be seeing familiar objects in a new way tonight, which suggests it’s a moment of growth for her.
Themes
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In the lounge, the moonlight bounces off the frame of the girl’s parents’ wedding photo and her father’s trumpet in its open case. The girl touches the gramophone and the piles of handwritten pages on her father’s desk. (Her father spends his evenings working toward his degree after coming home from work, so the girl and her brother play quietly so they don’t disturb him.) Seeing her father’s work makes the girl realize how vulnerable he is—a feeling she doesn’t experience when it comes to her mother, who seems to her like “the whole world.”
Though the mother has neatly stored her sewing items, the father has left his trumpet case open, which suggests he’s less bothered about keeping the household tidy—an attitude that, whether he intends it or not, directly circumvents her efforts. The fact that the father’s creative pursuits are allowed to take up more room than the mother’s points to the social expectation for women to prioritize their domestic tasks over any creative outlets.
Themes
Without the girl’s parents there, they seem more present to her, and she’s able to imagine their lives stretching far back from this moment. She imagines this current moment someday being in the past, too. Everything in the room seems big and important, and she feels an urge to disrupt it. She pushes the recliner over, so its legs are in the air, then tips over some other pieces of furniture and flips the goatskin rug. She does all this quietly, but once she’s finished, the room looks like a hurricane has torn through it. She feels shocked and gratified, and she resolves never to tell her parents that she did it. She wonders if they’ll find it funny.
The girl’s perception of the world seems to change and grow in a matter of minutes. She becomes aware of herself as one individual among many, each with complex pasts and inner lives. Her decision to mess up the lounge is a way of claiming power over a world that suddenly seems much larger than she is. However, her decision to keep it a secret suggests she doesn’t understand the complex reaction they might have to it, especially if they don’t know she did it.
Themes
The girl’s mother wakes up early. She listens out to check whether her son (the girl’s brother) has been calling out for her, but she doesn’t hear anything. She sits up carefully, so she doesn’t wake her husband (the girl’s father). The room is the same as it was when she went to sleep, except that her husband had thrown his clothes on top of hers after he came to bed.
The mother’s first actions are to listen out for her child and to prevent her husband from waking—she is, first and foremost, a caring mother and wife, prioritizing the comfort of others. The fact that the father seems to have carelessly tossed his clothes on top of the mother’s further emphasizes his lack of care that the house remain tidy.
Themes
The mother liked living in this apartment at first, but now she resents living beneath so many neighbors. They won’t be able to move into a house of their own until her husband (the father) finishes his degree. She goes to the bathroom and then returns to the bedroom, looking into the kitchen on the way. She sees that her husband didn’t eat the sandwich she left out for him last night and feels a flash of anger. She thinks she should’ve been a painter, not a dressmaker and housewife. But the tidiness of her house pleases her. She wonders if her husband would like bacon for breakfast, which his mother always used to make him.
The mother’s happiness at least partially depends on the success of the father’s academic pursuits—she has no power to change their circumstances herself. Even the power she does have—to look after the domestic needs of her family—seems threatened by her husband’s whims, which is perhaps why she’s so upset that he hasn’t eaten the food she prepared for him. The fact that she plans to prepare him breakfast like his mother did emphasizes her role as his caretaker, rather than his equal.
Themes
The mother catches sight of the lounge in disarray. She thinks someone has broken in and holds her breath, waiting for the intruder to appear. After she calms down, she notices that no windows or doors are open and nothing is missing. She goes into the children’s room where the girl and her brother are both fast asleep. She reaches the only conclusion she thinks is possible: her husband (the father), who can be moody at times, must’ve been frustrated with his work, or maybe the mess was a “brutal joke,” a demonstration of how much he despises her housekeeping efforts.
The mother considers the messy lounge an attack. It’s clearly a dramatic enough sight for her to think that an intruder caused it. Her second assumption—that her husband is to blame—highlights how children are often invisible to the adults around them and considered less capable of affecting their surroundings, which is arguably the feeling that compelled the girl to mess up the lounge in the first place. It also highlights an undercurrent of hostility between her and her husband.
Themes
The mother feels like she’s surely in the right for being angry. This new information about her husband (the father) excites her as much as it hurts her, and she feels like she can imagine the future more clearly now that he has confirmed that he’s her enemy. This is something she feels she already knew. She tidies the room and resolves never to acknowledge the event: she’ll wait for him to say something first. She goes back to bed and drops off to sleep before waking up to her son (the girl’s brother) calling her. She feels “refreshed and blessed.”
The mother feels more comfortable knowing (or thinking that she knows) that her husband is working against her than merely suspecting it. In this way, her imagination—which has allowed her to conclude that her husband is her enemy—sets her free from doubt and allows her to find clarity. But her secrecy prevents her from potentially finding out that her husband wasn’t actually at fault, and therefore creates a chasm between the two that will presumably never be repaired. These developments show that imagination can also distort people’s impressions and mislead them. When the mother goes to sleep and wakes up feeling “refreshed,” it's as if she, too, suffered a bad dream and has awakened to a clearer view of the world.
Themes
The mother fries bacon for the father’s breakfast while her son (the girl’s brother) eats cereal. The father packs his things up for work, then he comes to stand behind the mother and holds her affectionately. They kiss each other. She serves him breakfast, and then she goes to the children’s room to find the girl putting her socks on with one hand and reading her book with the other. Even though the girl has read it several times, she insists she has to start again from the beginning. The mother takes the book away and hurries the girl to get ready.
The mother’s actions directly conflict with how her feelings have changed toward her husband, demonstrating how much of their relationship depends on secrecy. While that secrecy allows them to coexist without external conflict, it also means their relationship continues under false pretenses, at least on the part of the mother. Meanwhile, the girl’s return to her favorite novel shows a yearning to return to the world of her imagination that, before last night, was such a happy refuge for her.
Themes
