Dream On

Throughout the book The Road, Cormac McCarthy repeatedly brings up the idea of dreams.  Dreams not only provide with details of the man and boy's past, but they also give the reader insight into how the characters currently think.

For example. through dreams, we get to see the man's pessimistic view of the world.  He says, "The right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death" (18).  He believes that since he is suffering, his dreams should be of suffering because then he won't wake up disappointed and realize how terrible his live was.

However, the man does have some pleasant dreams, particularly about his wife, the boy's mother.  These dreams are a significant contrast to the rest of the book because they make references to nature and beauty (such as "leafy canopy", "flowering wood where birds flew", and "aching blue" sky on page 18) , two things that are all but gone in the world.  These dreams, although pleasant, the man prefers not to have because they distract him from the brutal reality, which he does not want because it would only make him want to die more.

Dreams typically offer a chance to escape the reality and enter a new fictional world, but for the boy, he has never seen goodness, so he can only dream of bad things.  We hear this for the first time on page 269. when the boy says, "I don't have good dreams anyway.  They're always about something bad happening" (269).  The boy's dreams (we don't actually hear any of them specifically) show us that the reality is so bad that he can't even conceive of something good happening.  This, in a way, is a sign that he is not really human because the ability to imagine yourself in a different world is a purely human trait, and since the boy can't do that, part of his humanity is missing.