Dreams Symbol Analysis

As Darkness at Noon opens, the protagonist, Rubashov, is having one of his recurring dreams: that the police have come to arrest him, but he is too paralyzed to move. This time, though, he awakens from his dream to find that he is, indeed, about to be arrested. Rubashov experiences his own imprisonment and interrogation as a dizzying slippage between dreams and reality. Dreams have their own logic, their own laws, just as totalitarianism does. Indeed, while Rubashov thinks he’s lived long enough to understand how things work in his society, the new rules of the Party seem nonsensical to him, with no basis in reality. Throughout his time in prison, he’s denied so much sleep that this dreamlike quality comes to characterize all his waking hours. But dreams are also a way for Rubashov to deal with his incarceration by refusing to acquiesce to this new reality: engrossed by his own thoughts, caught up in the workings of his own mind, he uses day-dreams in particular as way to imagine alternate possibilities and to work through his past. Was everything he experienced in the past no more than a dream, he begins to ask himself, and is this imprisonment reality—or is it the other way around? The dream-world of the novel forces Rubashov to come to terms with what he’s done and the ramifications of everything he’s believed in, consequences that take place in an all-too-violent reality.