Dreams and Other Connections among Carver’s Recovered Stories

The three dreams recounted early on in “Dreams,” one of five posthumously discovered stories by Raymond Carver collected by Tess Gallagher in Call If You Need Me, resonate with events to come in the story. One of them as well seems to evoke the “burning child” dream in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (and with it the theme, pervasive in Carver’s writing, of a father’s hostility to his child). More strangely, the events and dreams of “Dreams” also appear to resonate with events in other stories in the collection, especially the immediately preceding story “What Would You Like to See?” and the immediately following “Vandals.” In this way, the connections between dreams and events in “Dreams” parallels the connections between the stories. Such echoes are a persistent feature of Carver’s writing, particularly evident in his poetic collection Ultramarine.