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Bad Dreams
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Bad Dreams, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Imagination
In “Bad Dreams,” imagination has the potential to bring people both horror and freedom. For the young female protagonist of the story, the book Swallows and Amazons provides refuge and joy, allowing her to relate to her classmates by sharing in the imagined world of the novel. The girl sleeps with the novel next to her and rereads it several times, treasuring it as a failsafe way to access a world beyond her own. But…
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Secrecy
Over the course of “Bad Dreams,” characters conceal truths from their loved ones in order to protect themselves. When the young girl, the story’s protagonist, wakes up from her nightmare, she considers telling her mother about it but decides not to. She’s afraid that her mother might laugh at her, or that speaking the details of the dream aloud would make them feel realer and more horrific. Either way, the girl is afraid that…
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Gender and Freedom
“Bad Dreams” illustrates the creative freedom people are either encouraged to—or denied ethe opportunity to—seek out due to the societal expectations of their genders. As the story’s protagonist, a young girl, wanders her house in the middle of the night, she observes that her mother has tidied away the sewing equipment and materials she uses daily and that the kitchen is extremely neat. Meanwhile, in the lounge, her father’s trumpet case is open…
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