Life to Dreams

In the book Stiches: A Memoir everything awkward and freaky grabs your attention. Throughout the whole book you are just stuck to it because of how weird but amazingly written it is. The one thing that always will get my mind spinning around is the dreams. The main character, David, has dreams in every tough moment he may just feel like running away. You can tell that he begins to distance himself more from everyone because his dreams start occurring more often than usual. In the beginning reading of the book there was only one dream. Then as the sections went on, it became to three dreams in one section. The character had more things happening in his everyday life that it gave his brain a trigger to dream away to its own place.

In the book the first official dream David has is when his mother sends him to bed with nothing. On page 45 he says, “sent to bed with no supper, I dreamed that night of the little man in the jar” (Small). The illustration shows him screaming going into some sort of dark black hole with the little man reaching for his hand. There are also some strange objects floating down with him. A safety pin, beads, a key, and a small toy cowboy are all included in the black hole. Some of these objects were mentioned earlier in the book which brings me back to how he dreams of things that were mentioned recently or that may mean something to him. One thing that I still haven’t connected yet is the key, so I think it might show up later. I think it’s one of those objects that give off a foreshadowing sense.

One of his other dreams that popped out to me is the one on page 196-200. This dream happens after David has his surgery and just had removed the bandage. A few moments before walking to his room he slams the door on his mom. It showed the first revolt on his mother. He fought back and slammed it as she always would to other doors. Once he gets to bed he lays then you see him grip the sheets and eyes scrunched in like he was scared. The dream was of a bat out in the cold shivering out alone. Then it starts raining and lightning comes striking. The bat starts to cry and yells, “MAMA!” (Small). If you thought the bat was as weird as it could get just wait. An umbrella appears in the picture and he calls that mama. He was happy and full of energy but then once he opens it the umbrella is destroyed. When I first saw this I noticed what it may have been comparing to. I think the bat represents David and the umbrella represents his mother. The whole dream represents their relationship with each other. It describes how he cries out for his mom and desperately needs her especially with him seeing his scar for the first time. The turning point is that his mom never really is there for him and seems as she doesn’t care. She becomes a kind of disappointment to him like the umbrella does for the bat.

These were two of the dreams that appeared more interesting of them all because of the curiosity and odd elements. When an author has a reader curious then he has the reader hooked in the book. David Small does that with these dream sequences. I think he does an awesome job at it. It has me hooked and I don’t really like books or get hooked easily. I am now just anxious to find out about what the key might mean and how the mother son relationship turns out.

… off to read …