What's In a Dream?

In Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the rather mentally derailed first-person narrator, Chief Bromden, often goes on delusional tirades describing life in the mental hospital.  Bromden’s empathetic way of thinking forces him to be driven into a world that allows him to escape the pain of sharing other people’s feelings. In this way, Bromden has created a seemingly “alternate universe” that surrounds him at the mental hospital. At one instance, Bromden believes that the hospital ward has the ability to descend into the bottom of the building, where workers wait with machines to open the patients and spill out their mechanical innards, ultimately killing them. When he wakes up the next morning, Bromden promises not to reveal his revelation to others because they would tell him that it was just a dream, and to this opinion Bromdem thinks, “But if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?” (90). This rhetorical question juxtaposed with the rest of the outlandish outbursts described in the text has given me loads of crazy thoughts in the past week, enough so that in AP Biology last week  I blurted out, “I can’t wait to meet you again in heaven, Lizzy!”  This rather obscure comment got me thinking: it will be so cool to meet all of my old acquaintances in heaven!  And with our new, ageless physiques, Lizzy and I will even be able to do gymnastics together again! So maybe that’s not exactly how the future will pan out, but time certainly puts strains on our hearts that calls us back to people from our pasts. Although fights and conflicts may spark dislike and abhorrence towards people now, after years and years of distance, the ability to meet that person again and see them once more does not sound bad at all.