Throughout the novel, dreaming is something that ties the characters together. How do the characters’ dreams reflect their emotional states, in your opinion?
Dreams speak to us what is unspoken when awake. Rarely is the context of the dream important to me but rather the emotions felt. These feelings can linger throughout the day, too. The book’s characters searched dreams for meanings.
Their dreams often are disjointed, as their lives are. Not that dreams always make logical sense, for anyone. Many of the dreams especially for Orvil are nightmares, violence, and sometimes it’s not clear whether something is a dream or a buried memory. Addictions and trauma influence his dreams, which is to be expected.
Carl Jung spoke about the collective unconscious, a shared pool of memories and stories that are passed down through generation. Dreaming is important to their culture. Opal gave Orvil a dream catcher which he was initially reluctant to hang in his car, because it was so stereotypical. But he eventually did embrace it.