Dreams and Narrative
Everyone dreams. It’s a fact. As such, the dreamer many times takes for granted the fact their dream narratives are sometimes weird. After years of having them, one is not surprised at their structure, or lack thereof.
The first time reader of magical realism, however, may be set aback by its inconsistencies: in the world of the novel time is fluid, people live to well over 100, and young girls can levitate. For this reason it can be useful to think about the novel from the standpoint of the dream structure. Dreams, too, can be strange, mundane, blissful, or even shocking, but rarely are they a problem to conceptualize.
As leading scientist in dream biology J. Allan Hobson notes in The Dream Drugstore, we realize that “dreaming…is an altered state of consciousness” because the “unique features of waking consciousness are lost” (7). He adds that There is little confusion when recalling them upon waking, even though when we are in our own dream “stories” we
Delusionally believe that we are awake when we are in fact asleep; we delusionally believe that we are perceiving a real outside world, whereas we are actually creating that world without the benefit of external stimuli; and we are not capable of critically observing, assessing and appreciating our delusional and confabulatory awareness (8).
It is not usually a problem to see ourselves in these sometimes nonsensical story lines, and still have the awareness of ourselves recounting them in “real life.” 
Not only that, the experience of the dream is so powerful that sometimes we even confuse them with reality. This is, ideally, what we are to experience when reading Solitude. The world presented to us is strange and magical, we are to accept them with the same understanding that we have about dreams.
But even if we become convinced of the efficiency of the dream narrative over other models to describe fictional spaces, we still may ask “So what?” Well, as Wilson claims, “space is invariably present in fiction though never precisely so. It is very much an aspect of the experience of reading, and without it a fictional world would be (I think) hard to imagine” (216). He reinforces this argument when he later states that in the conception of the fictional world, “signification generates the experience of the bulk” (217). If one is to ascribe to this belief, as I am apt to, the importance of the guiding structure becomes clear. Fictional space is important because it establishes in our minds the reality of world the author sets out to create. Wilson quotes literary critic Ricardo Gullon’s argument, that “the effective test of narrative…is whether it affects the reader and makes him or her feel and ‘understand the meaning of space in which the characters exist’” (216). The space in which Marquez’s characters exist is Macondo, a town in postcolonial Latin America. As in many other postcolonial narratives, we ultimately see a challenging of the narrow ideology and institutions that were superimposed on the population after the conquest. The strange reality of these two cultures intermingling is what Marquez wants us to experience, for after all, he believes that “Macondo is a state of mind” (Mendoza 77). For this reason it makes more sense to employ the framework of dreams, as they are organic to us all, rather than those of science or mathematics, (as offered by other critics) two institutions whose authority has been traditionally centered in the world of the colonizer.
Upper right: Frida Kahlo, The Dream, 1940
Bottom left: Marc Cohen, Cathleen Toelke, Book Cover, 1998
Read more:
Considering Dreams in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Fictional Space
Dreams and Narrative
Magical Realism: The World of Macondo
Meaningful Bizarreness
Marquez and Jung
Concluding Thoughts
Further Reading
About the Author