The girl’s favorite book, Swallows and Amazons, represents the comforting, and sometimes terrifying, potential of imagination. The girl keeps the book near her, sleeping next to it and holding it while trying to complete other tasks. She’s read it several times and reenacts its scenes with her friends at school. It’s clearly a source of delight and comfort for her, a world she can return to in her imagination as much as she likes. But her nightmare, in which she discovers an epilogue to the novel that details its characters’ mundane later lives and deaths, casts a sinister light on the book: her imagination has betrayed her. The book is therefore a potent reminder that although imagination can be held in a small, seemingly benign object like a book, it can become an unwieldy and terrifying force. Imagination can inform its bearer of truths they might not have wanted to consider.
The Girl’s Book Quotes in Bad Dreams
Something had happened, she was sure, while she was asleep. She didn’t know what it was at first, but the strong dread it had left behind didn’t subside with the confusion of waking. Then she remembered that this thing had happened inside her sleep, in her dream.
Susan lived to a ripe old age. Susan was the dullest of the Swallows, tame and sensible, in charge of cooking and housekeeping. Still, the idea of her ‘ripe old age’ was full of horror: wasn’t she just a girl, with everything ahead of her?
When she was younger she had called to her mother if she woke in the night, but something stopped her from calling out now: she didn’t want to tell anyone about this. Once the words were said aloud, she would never be rid of them; it was better to keep them hidden.
The Girl’s Book Symbol Timeline in Bad Dreams
