Solaris Chapter 12: The Dreams Summary & Analysis

Six days after the first encephalogram X-ray, Solaris’s ocean has not responded, so the scientists decide to try again. They fly the station southward and, after two days of travel, resend another encephalogram of Kelvin’s brain at the ocean via X-ray. After another two days, they repeat the experiment again. Meanwhile, Kelvin worries that Sartorius still secretly plans to build a neutrino “disruptor,” though neither Sartorius nor Snow has said anything further about it, and Kelvin’s relationship with Rheya has grown tense and precarious.

Both the human scientists and the reader lack enough information to interpret the ocean’s non-reaction to the encephalogram. Does the encephalogram simply mean nothing to the ocean? Is the ocean interpreting the encephalogram slowly? Is the ocean reacting in ways that the scientists can’t perceive? The scientists’ inability to answer these questions suggests the futility of the encephalogram experiment when the scientists know so little not only about the ocean, but also about what Kelvin’s encephalogram might have communicated to it. Meanwhile, Kelvin’s ongoing fear that the other scientists might try to kill the replica of Rheya underscores his loyalty and attachment to her, over and against any loyalty he might feel to the other human scientists.

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Kelvin has begun having peculiar dreams, in which he is trapped in and composed of “alien matter.” In the dreams, he feels that an unseen entity is waiting for him to agree to something that he must not agree to. Then some physical entity “recreates” his body; in turn, his new body perceives and so “create[s]” a face that is, perhaps, female. Then a third entity of “unimaginable cruelty” transforms their bodies into a “mass of glutinous coiling worms,” and Kelvin feels a horrified desire to die until he wakes up. He has other dreams as well, dreams he can’t even describe, in which no hint of Rheya is present. He begins trying not to fall asleep. Though he doesn’t tell Rheya about his dreams, he believes she knows due to the “deep humiliation” she seems to be feeling.

Again, it is impossible to know whether Kelvin’s peculiar dreams are communications from Solaris’s ocean as a result of the encephalogram experiment or simply productions of his troubled unconscious mind. This impossibility parallels the inscrutability of the alien ocean with the inscrutability of the human unconscious, perhaps suggesting that human beings are, at times, psychologically “alien” to themselves. The replica of Rheya’s “deep humiliation” is similarly ambiguous. Does she feel humiliated because some of his dreams involve a female figure that, along with him, turns into a disgusting “mass of glutinous coiling worms”—suggesting that Kelvin on some level finds her disgusting? That is, does she feel humiliated by his unconscious attitude toward her? Or, on the other hand, does she feel humiliated because her creator, the ocean, is tormenting him? Readers have no way of knowing for sure.

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Fifteen days after the first X-ray experiment, Kelvin wakes up from bad dreams. Through his window, he sees mist rolling across the ocean and a unique formation rising from the waves. The next night, the ocean glows with light. For the next two weeks, nothing happens—except that, one night, an inhuman scream from the lab wakes Kelvin from a nightmare. After another couple days, Snow—apparently drunk—finds Kelvin and Rheya in the kitchen. When Kelvin suggests that Snow go sleep it off, Snow asks why Kelvin, like Gibarian, has stopped shaving and warns Kelvin not to visit the lab, where Sartorius has discovered “prolonged dying” in his search for “immortality in reverse.”

Is the ocean’s new, unique formation or its glowing light a response to Kelvin’s encephalogram? While these peculiar events occurring after the scientists have beamed the encephalogram at the ocean are suggestive, neither the scientists nor the reader can ultimately know for sure. Meanwhile, a drunken Snow’s alarming claim that Sartorius has discovered “prolonged dying” while searching for “immortality in reverse” implies that Sartorius is torturing his visitor to death in an attempt to keep the visitor from ever returning. Evidently, despite Snow’s earlier claim that the scientists’ situation was “beyond morality,” he still has trouble stomaching Sartorius’s torture of a sentient, humanoid entity like one of the visitors.

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Snow looks to Rheya and calls her “fair Aphrodite, child of ocean” before beginning to cough. When Kelvin demands that Snow leave, Snow suggests that they go open the station’s doors and tell the ocean what it’s done to them. Then he claims that the ocean’s visitors are the ocean’s way of asking the scientists to “help it die,” and that Sartorius really just wants to “punish” Solaris’s ocean with his experiments. Weeping, Snow asks who is responsible for their predicament and calls Gibarian, Giese, Einstein, and Plato “criminals.” Then he exits. Kelvin wants to go to Rheya but sits paralyzed where he is.

Aphrodite is the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty; in some versions of her origin myth, she was born from the mixture of the god Uranus’s castrated testicles and ocean foam. By calling the replica of Rheya “Aphrodite, child of ocean,” Snow is associating the visitors and the ocean with ancient human gods—another instance of the human scientists treating religiously phenomena that they do not understand scientifically. Meanwhile, Einstein refers to famous physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and Plato to the ancient Greek philosopher (c. 428–348 B.C.E.). When Snow calls Einstein and Plato, as well as Solarist researchers Gibarian and Giese, “criminals,” he seems to be suggesting that there is something dangerous and immoral about the human quest for knowledge. This suggestion underscores Snow’s disgust at Sartorius’s implied torture of his visitor, with which Sartorius is trying to “punish” the ocean.

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Solaris: Chapter 12: The Dreams Summary & Analysis