In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

“I feel as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen.”

The opening paragraph establishes the narrator as an unusually passive protagonist, even by the standards of a dream. His is the central perspective, or point of view, in the story; yet he does very little. He dreams that he’s sitting in an old-fashioned movie theater, watching the projector beam flicker and project images on the silver screen. Ironically, he is a protagonist with no agency, even though the events he watches (his parents’ courtship) form part of the story of his own life. His inability to change or intervene in these events will cause him great frustration and distress.

“I am anonymous, and I have forgotten myself. It is always so when one goes to the movies, it is, as they say, a drug.”

As the protagonist settles in to watch the movie within his dream, he feels “anonymous,” as if his identity has melted away. Using the metaphor of “a drug,” he suggests that movies in general transport us into an altered state—into escapist worlds where we can “forg[et]” ourselves and our daily lives. Yet these sentences also set up an ironic twist. The protagonist won’t be able to forget his identity for long because this movie shows the story of his parents’ courtship, and therefore the circumstances that gave rise to his troubled life.