Dreaming played a huge role for the characters in this novel. Many of the characters were caught in a dream-like state when they first encountered the vampires knocking on their windows or front door to be let in. For example, when the Glick boy came to visit Mark Petrie while he was sleeping, Mark hesitated to open it. He subconciously knew that vampires did exist and he knew not to open the window. But for many others, their dreams became realities when they invited the vampires into their homes not knowing that they existed.
The novel also wrestled with dreaming in a non-literal sense. Many times when a person didn't want to believe that something was real, they tended to automatically assume they were dreaming. As a reader, this made the plot more complicated because I didn't know if the character was dreaming or if the character really did see something. And if the character did see something and didn't want to believe it, was it really there? The first instance of dreaming I came across was Ben Mears talking about an old dream.
pg. 45
"That night he had the old dream for the first time since he had come to Jerusalem's Lot...The run up the hallway, the horrible scream of the door as he pulled it open, the dangling figure suddenly opening its hideous puffed eyes, himself turning to the door in the slow, pudgy panic of dreams -"
Throughout the rest of the novel, Ben Mears struggled with whether or not he saw Hubie Marsten hung in the attic of the Marsten house or if his fears just took over and he imagined it. It wasn't until Ben finally found other people like Matt Burke and Mark Petrie who experienced the same thing did he begin to think it was a reality and not just a dream.
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