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 as this story begins, she wakes up from a nightmare in which she discovered a secret epilogue to her beloved novel. The girl finds the imaginary epilogue horrific: it details the mundane lives and deaths that the novel’s vibrant, youthful characters go on to live after the novel ends. Just as the girl’s imagination allows her to indulge in a fictional world, it also opens that world up to the creeping dread of reality.
Meanwhile, the girl’s mother demonstrates that imagination can have a profound effect on one’s experience of reality. When she discovers that someone has caused chaos in the lounge, tipping over all the furniture and leaving the room in a state of disarray, her imagination first leads her to assume that someone has invaded the house. Ultimately, she concludes that her husband (the girl’s father) must have thrown a fit of rage—or, perhaps, played a cruel joke on her to show her how little he regards her efforts to keep the house in good shape. The woman’s subsequent train of thought leads her to decide that her husband—who, in fact, had nothing to do with the mess in the living room—is her enemy. This conclusion doesn’t really upset the mother, however. Instead, it seems to provide clarity that allows her to cope with her life, in which she’s frustrated by the limits of being a housewife and mother. In this way, “Bad Dreams” highlights the power of imagination to delight us, enrage us, or betray us. In any case, the characters’ inner conflicts portray imagination as a potent force that can illuminate one’s experience of reality as much as it can warp it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Imagination ThemeTracker
Imagination 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.
She had read about moonlight, but had never taken in its reality before; it made the lampshade of Spanish wrought iron, which had always hung from a chain in the hallway, seem suddenly as barbaric as a cage or a portcullis in a castle.
The reality of the things in the room seemed more substantial to the child than she was herself—and she wanted in a sudden passion to break something, to disrupt this world of her home, sealed in its mysterious stillness, where her bare feet made no sound on the lino or the carpets.
This time, for once, she was clearly in the right, wasn’t she? He had been childish, giving way to his frustration—as if she didn’t feel fed up sometimes. And he criticised her for her bad temper!
[…] she seemed to see the future with great clarity, looking forward through a long tunnel of antagonism, in which her husband was her enemy. This awful truth appeared to be something she had always known, though in the past it had been clouded in uncertainty and now she saw it starkly.
