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Crazy Horse
“Nobody dreams all the time,” one of Alexie’s unnamed narrators says, “because it would hurt all the time.” Throughout this text, dreams represent an alternate reality, and symbolize either an escape from the present or simply an improvement on it. In one dream Victor has as a child, he and his family visit a restaurant, and it is warm inside. Victor describes his alcoholic parents, on nights in his youth when he sleeps between them, as “dreamless”—their dreamlessness symbolizes a resignation, a loss of drive, an acceptance of the mundanity and predestination of their lives. In “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” Thomas Builds-the-Fire describes a dream he had of journeying to Spokane—in the dream, he knew he would receive a vision if he waited by the Falls. Once he walked there, though, in his real, waking life, Victor’s father came upon him and chastised him for foolishly awaiting a vision, and brought him home to the reservation. “Your dad was my vision,” Thomas tells Victor; “Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying.” In “Distances,” Alexie’s dystopic alternate vision of an Indian-only American society, the narrator repeatedly dreams of television “and [wakes] up crying.”
In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Victor, Junior, and Thomas Builds-the-Fire “all want to have their vision, to receive their true names, their adult names.” As we see at several points throughout the collection, receiving a vision is seen by many of Alexie’s characters as a rite of passage; this line of thought seems to be connected to the same idea his characters have when imagining Crazy Horse. It’s both an imposed line of thought and a deeply culturally internalized one, and one that’s morphed as the tribe itself has changed. “Does every Indian depend on Hollywood for a twentieth-century vision?” one character asks. Visions symbolize a yearning toward an identity and a way of life that may or may not be long gone; toward an emergence into adulthood that may not be an option for young Indians anymore. Alexie’s characters’ rites of passage are much more mundane than receiving spiritual visions, or going off on vision quests, and their reckoning with this fact is a thread throughout the entire collection.
Dreams and Visions Quotes in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
The The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven quotes below all refer to the symbol of Dreams and Visions. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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A Drug Called Tradition
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Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you... Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That’s what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now.”
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The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire
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Your honor, if I may continue, there is much more I need to say. There are so many more stories to tell.
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Distances
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Last night I dreamed about television. I woke up crying.
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Imagining the Reservation
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Survival = Anger x Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.
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Imagine Crazy Horse invented the atom bomb in 1876 and detonated it over Washington, D.C.; imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean… Imagine every day is Independence Day. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.
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Indian Education
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I picked up a basketball for the first time and made my first shot. No. I missed my first shot, missed the basket completely, and the ball landed in the dirt and sawdust, sat there just like I had sat there only minutes before. But it felt good, that ball in my hands, all those possibilities and angles. It was mathematics, geometry. It was beautiful.
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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
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These days, living alone in Spokane, I wish I lived closer to the river, to the falls where ghosts of salmon jump. I wish I could sleep. I put down my paper or book and turn off the lights, lie quietly in the dark. It may take hours, even years, for me to sleep again. There’s nothing surprising or disappointing in that. I know how all my dreams end anyway.
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Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show
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Junior hung up the phone and walked down the highway toward the reservation. He wanted to imagine that he was walking off into the sunset, into a happy ending. But he knew that all along the road he traveled, there were reservation drive-ins, each showing a new and painful sequel to the first act of his life.
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Dreams and Visions Symbol Timeline in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
The timeline below shows where the symbol Dreams and Visions appears in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Every Little Hurricane
...the sky [and onto] the Spokane Indian Reservation”; the storm wakes nine-year-old Victor from a nightmare. A third person narrator describes Victor’s experience; he is in the basement of his family’s...
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A Drug Called Tradition
...but they leave early go try some “new drugs” at Benjamin Lake and hopefully experience visions. Victor says that he hopes the experience will be “spiritual” and “very fucking Indian.”
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After driving a little ways, the two boys see Thomas standing by the side of the road; he has left his own party in...
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...the drug. Though Junior is driving, Victor obliges. The boys reach the lake, and Junior’s vision begins; he can see Thomas “dancing naked around a fire.” He describes his vision-Thomas as...
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...and Victor tells him to slow down. Both Junior and Thomas are consumed by their visions. Victor leans over to the driver’s seat to stop the car, and Junior jumps out...
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...Thomas says, “have decided to be real Indians tonight. They all want to have their vision, to receive their true names, their adult names.” In Thomas’s vision, the boys are all...
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Victor and Junior stay at the lake until the sun comes up, experiencing residual visions. The following day, the spiritual leader of the tribe, Big Mom, comes upon them, and...
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Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock
...Victor would fall asleep beneath the table where his father sat, and the two would “dream together until the sun came up.”
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Victor describes his vivid dreams of his father at Woodstock, but admits that “as much as [he] dream[s] about it,...
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Victor recalls a dream he had, soon after his father left, of his father returning to their HUD house...
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This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona
At the Trading Post Victor sees Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who is talking to himself “like always.” Victor recalls a time, when he...
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...Thomas tells a story of Victor’s father. Once, as a young man, Thomas had a dream that “told” him to go to Spokane, stand at the Falls, and “wait for a...
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...his wing” and flapping their arms in mockery. Victor knew, he says, that “everybody has dreams about flying,” and that the boys hated him because “one of his dreams came true...
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...will go back to the Spokane Falls and scatter the ashes there. He describes a vision he has of Victor’s father “ris[ing] like a salmon, leap[ing] over the bridge, and find[ing]...
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All I Wanted To Do Was Dance
Victor experiences a memory or vision of his former girlfriend; she stands by a river, and she is “so white his...
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...tells himself that he’ll go running later that day. Instead, though, he turns on the television, and watches as a “pretty blond woman” delivers the local news. Suddenly overwhelmed by his...
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The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire
...“felony charge[s].” Meanwhile, Thomas sits alone in his cell, counting bugs and allowing stories and visions to wash over him. He looks out at the sky through the bars over his...
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...stand, closes his eyes, and speaks. He begins to tell a story, and describes a vision of himself as a pony living in 1858. Colonel George Wright, he says, stole 800...
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...was, at sixteen years old, about to head into his first battle. He describes a vision of a bloody battle, full of days of fighting. When the prosecutor asks Thomas how...
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An article in a local newspaper describes Thomas’s sentencing. “the self-proclaimed visionary of the Spokane Tribe,” it says, “was sentenced today to two concurrent life terms in...
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Distances
Thomas Builds-the-Fire describes a vision of the world in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event in which “most of the...
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Thomas repeatedly “dream[s] about television [and wakes] up crying.”
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Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation
A year later, in 1968, the narrator’s television has exploded and left a hole in the wall, and he hasn’t replaced it. The...
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Some months later, James still doesn’t speak, but kicks violently while dreaming. The narrator breaks his leg playing basketball, but is unable to afford an operation. At...
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On James’s birthday, the narrator watches the Vietnam War on television in a local bar. He goes to a Christmas party and leaves James with a...
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...and the police arrest him for abandonment. The narrator lies in jail, drunk and experiencing visions of snakes, Nazis, the KKK, and TV dinners.
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...[he’s] praying to, and if it’s the basketball gathering ash on the shelf or the television.” Sometimes the narrator wants to drink “so bad that it aches and [he] cries,” though...
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On Christmas Day, James speaks clearly directly to the narrator, seemingly revealing a series of visions. “He says the world hurts. He says the first thing...
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...has become our mother and that they both hate each other.” The narrator experiences a vision of the future, in which James washes his old, sick body, and cares for him...
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A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result
On the morning of his birthday, Samuel Builds-the-Fire—grandfather to Thomas, and a visionary storyteller himself—dresses and readies for work. He is a maid at a motel in Spokane....
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...and all of his friends have died. No one has time for his stories and visions anymore.
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The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue
...tournament. He suggests that basketball should become the tribe’s “new religion.” All across the carnival, dreams, the narrator says, “crackle like campfire, put on a good jacket that smells of fry...
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Imagining the Reservation
...to “read futures by touching hands.” The child told the narrator’s friends and tribesmen of visions of missing relatives, and instructed the narrator to “break every mirror in [his] house and...
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The narrator wonders if “every Indian depend[s] on Hollywood for a twentieth-century vision.” He remembers watching The Tonight Show on television with his sisters, eating potatoes with food...
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Indian Education
...“good-byes to [his] entire tribe.” When he opens his eyes, he says, he experiences a vision in which “she was gone from the reservation, and I was gone from the reservation,...
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...people take photographs of him he looks toward the future. Back on the reservation, Junior imagines his former classmates’ graduation: he imagines them “look[ing] back toward tradition.” The tribal newspaper “runs...
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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
...her job as a kindergarten teacher, and she berated his drinking. Victor began having disturbing dreams, and often saw himself as a doomed war chief, or witnessed horrible acts of violence...
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...was unsurprised by his return. Listless and sad, he did little at first but watch television. When he got tired of watching TV so much, he started playing basketball again, shooting...
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...insomniac, Victor wishes he could sleep, but accepts his condition. “I know how all my dreams end anyway,” he says.
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Family Portrait
An unnamed narrator recalls his childhood; the first thing he remembers is that “the television was always too loud.” He mishears the words he can hear coming out of it,...
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...passage of time and the dissolution of his memories, able to remember little but the television. He has one memory of a time “the reservation disappeared” during a game of playing...
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...of his seizures, during which his mother “wanted to believe” he was able to have visions of the future. The narrator recalls dancing to music frequently with his siblings and parents,...
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...remembers his father teaching him how to drive while describing the story of “the first television he ever saw,” and how he and his friends would walk again and again to...
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Somebody Kept Saying Powwow
...joyous dancer. After the powwow, Norma drops Junior off at home, and he has a dream about her. He dreams of her “a hundred years ago,” riding bareback and shouting something...
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...to know what the world “out there” is like. Junior describes it as “a bad dream you never wake up from.”
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Flight
...on the porch with his suitcase, “watching the sky for signs.” He then has a vision of a jet “ripp[ing] through the sound barrier,” and he can “see vapor trails stretched...
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John-John, having fallen asleep, dreams of all the ways his brother might return to him. Upon waking, he revels in...
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Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show
Junior Polatkin has recurring dreams of being a gunfighter named Sonny Six-Gun. In his dreams he speaks Spokane and guns...
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