Dreams and Visions Symbol Analysis

“Nobody dreams all the time,” one of Alexie’s unnamed narrators says, “because it would hurt all the time.” Throughout this text, dreams represent an alternate reality, and symbolize either an escape from the present or simply an improvement on it. In one dream Victor has as a child, he and his family visit a restaurant, and it is warm inside. Victor describes his alcoholic parents, on nights in his youth when he sleeps between them, as “dreamless”—their dreamlessness symbolizes a resignation, a loss of drive, an acceptance of the mundanity and predestination of their lives. In “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” Thomas Builds-the-Fire describes a dream he had of journeying to Spokane—in the dream, he knew he would receive a vision if he waited by the Falls. Once he walked there, though, in his real, waking life, Victor’s father came upon him and chastised him for foolishly awaiting a vision, and brought him home to the reservation. “Your dad was my vision,” Thomas tells Victor; “Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying.” In “Distances,” Alexie’s dystopic alternate vision of an Indian-only American society, the narrator repeatedly dreams of television “and [wakes] up crying.”

In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Victor, Junior, and Thomas Builds-the-Fire “all want to have their vision, to receive their true names, their adult names.” As we see at several points throughout the collection, receiving a vision is seen by many of Alexie’s characters as a rite of passage; this line of thought seems to be connected to the same idea his characters have when imagining Crazy Horse. It’s both an imposed line of thought and a deeply culturally internalized one, and one that’s morphed as the tribe itself has changed. “Does every Indian depend on Hollywood for a twentieth-century vision?” one character asks. Visions symbolize a yearning toward an identity and a way of life that may or may not be long gone; toward an emergence into adulthood that may not be an option for young Indians anymore. Alexie’s characters’ rites of passage are much more mundane than receiving spiritual visions, or going off on vision quests, and their reckoning with this fact is a thread throughout the entire collection.