“the fact that they were real in a way I’ll probably never be, nor my kids, or anything,”

The narrator talks a lot about her dreams in this section and wonders if women have always remembered their dreams while cooking. She dreams that the entire family goes horseback riding, and Gillian’s friend Bobby wants to jump into a pool from a second story window; that she went deep-sea fishing; that she attended a meeting where she was supposed to bring in two things that an animal said to her; about an Arab family who gave each son a new watch every year, etc. She reflects that everyone has uncontrollable imaginations when it comes to dreaming, and it’s such a waste that we all forget our dreams almost immediately when we awaken.

The entire family has dreams: Gillian dreamt that a pasha lives nearby; Leo, that he was Barbara Bush(!); Jake about an owl that’s also a boy. As a kid the narrator dreamt that she could fly, but she doesn’t think that her kids ever dream about that. What is it about these dreams--her family member’s and her own--that make them so interesting to the narrator? And how do her dreams relate to her memories? Like her memory, the narrator believes that she’s not very good at dreaming and that others do it better. I’m not so sure:

“the fact that everybody else has better dreams than me, the fact that everybody has their own dreaming style, just like their own thinking style, and walking and talking style, the fact that I usually just dream that the bill comes to $145 instead of $124 because I didn’t allow for tax, or that there was a huge airplane hovering in the back yard, unable to land, and we were signaling sympathetically to the passengers, and then the plane finally managed to twist itself around but, in the process, cut our phone line, or that a pregnant woman’s eating a suspect slice of cake and I happen to know it might cause birth defects, and the only solution I can think up to the problem is to reverse time, so she won’t be given that particular piece of cake, the fact that if that scheme didn’t work out, I was going to tell her privately “Pregnant women shouldn’t eat this kind of cake,”

I was struck by two childhood memories about which the narrator thinks, “that was about as much fun as I ever had.” One in which she was able to swim in waterfalls while at camp, and another when they lived in Rome and her class dressed in little yellow bird costumes that their teachers made for them.

I really don’t agree with the narrator when she thinks that her capacities to dream and to remember are somehow inferior, perhaps because the vividness of her dreams and memories belies her assertions. Rather, I think she is frustrated by her inability to recapture the felt reality of experience, both past and present.

“the fact that I forget how real Mommy and Daddy were, the fact that existence is a fact, even if it happened in the past, as any History major should know…the fact that they led full lives and had a history as real as mine, realer even, more productive anyway, the fact that they were real in a way I’ll probably never be, nor my kids, or anything, and I don’t like their history disappearing with them,”

Can anyone who lives in her own head as much as our narrator fully experience life in the real world?