Considering Dreams in One Hundred Years of Solitude
The reality you are dealing with in a novel is different from real life, although it is rooted in it. The same is true of dreams.
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1982
For a minute, let’s try to imagine a place of contradictions. This place is both ancient and developing, both “exotic” and familiar. 
It’s people are both Christian and “savage,” angry and peaceful, marked by tragedy but still filled with beauty. This place is America, but it is not the United States. The place we are trying to imagine is Latin America, and the contradictions we attempt to entertain are those engendered by a long history of colonialism.
This world may or may not be difficult to envision. It is certainly not for the millions of Latin Americans whom, whether living in their country or not, carry its legacy within them. The colonization and subsequent liberation from European control have given Latinos, (the indigenous, black, white, and Mestizo people of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean) the consciousness in which such clashes exist. But what about everyone else? Is it possible to understand this reality when it’s so different from their own?
The answer can be found in Gabriel Garcia’s Marquez’ novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We know that literature in general has the ability to bring us into worlds we are unable to access by ourselves. Simply by using our imaginations, we can take a step closer to the lives the author presents to us. However, the bridging of consciousness attempted in Marquez’ novel, I argue, has a more profound affect. This is because the narrative mode he uses to depict the conflicting reality of Latin America is magical realism, and magical realism, in turn, garners its power through its use of the language and structure of dreams.
Magical realism, the term a contradiction itself, is the weaving of the bizarre and the realistic in an otherwise normal plot. The characters which observe various fantastic events do not question them, but simply accept them as a part of their material reality. The same happens when we dream. No matter how strange or illogical our dreams may be, we, for the most part, do not question the experience. The dreamer, the characters of Solitude and the real people it represents, accept the logical inconsistencies they face because this bizarreness is their reality.
Very rarely have literary critics included the dream structure in their analyses of Solitude or magical realism. Considering all their similarities, we may wonder why they are not more fundamental in their understanding. As we noted above, both narratives allow for realistic/fantastic occurrences, but they also allow for leaps in time, the surfacing of archetypes, and most importantly, the conceptual space in which all these dreamlike elements can exist and create meaning where they may not have in traditional narratives or our normal waking reality.
In the same manner that dreams are revelatory of the hidden parts of our psyches, the use of magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude allows the reader a specifically Latin American experience, one not easily accessible through the ordinary "realistic" novel.
Upper right: William Blake, Europe Supported By Africa & America, Engraving
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