Dreamland was Portsmouth, Ohio’s local swimming pool from 1929 until its demolition in 1993. To the community of Portsmouth, memories of Dreamland represent happier, more prosperous, and more community-oriented times, an ideal that Quinones deems important enough to name the book after. Portsmouth, along with the rest of the American heartland, was hit particularly hard by deindustrialization and the opiate epidemic that developed in its wake. The demolition of the Dreamland swimming pool resulted from and was reflective of the town’s (and America’s) trend toward depression and isolation. When America’s industrial workers lost their jobs, they indirectly turned away from their communities and toward isolating coping mechanisms like drug use to help numb the pain. To Portsmouth’s residents, the pool symbolizes a moment in history when their town and its people were thriving. The Dreamland swimming pool evokes similar ideas to Quinones, who believes that community and compassion are “antidotes” to heroin use, which he considers to be both a cause and a symptom of American culture’s increasingly isolated, anti-community culture. Dreamland represents community and togetherness, both of which Quinones believes are essential for America to recover from the opiate epidemic.
Dreamland Quotes in Dreamland
The signature location of this drug scourge, meanwhile, was not the teeming, public crack houses. It was, instead, kids’ private suburban bedrooms and cars—the products of American prosperity. The bedroom was the addict’s sanctuary, the shrine to the self-involvement dope provokes. It was their own little dreamland, though quite the opposite of Portsmouth’s legendary community pool, where kids grew up in public and under a hundred watchful eyes. Each suburban middle-class kid had a private bedroom and the new addicts retreaded to them to dope up and die.
Most of these parents were products, as I am, of the 1970s, when heroin was considered the most vile, back-alley drug. How could they now tell their neighbors that the child to whom they had given everything was a prostitute who expired while shooting up in a car outside a Burger King? Shamed and horrified by the stigma, many could not, and did not.
So the battered old town had hung on. It was, somehow, a beacon embracing shivering and hollow-eyed junkies, letting them know that all was not lost. That at the bottom of the rubble was a place just like them, kicked and buried but surviving. A place that had, like them, shredded and lost so much that was precious but was nurturing it again. Though they were adrift, they, too, could begin to find their way back. Back to that place called Dreamland.
We wound up dangerously separate from each other—whether in poverty or in affluence. Kids no longer play in the street. Parks are underused. Dreamland lies buried beneath a strip mall. Why then do we wonder that heroin is everywhere? In our isolation, heroin thrives; that’s its natural habitat.
Dreamland Symbol Timeline in Dreamland
