Michael Hemmer: The Terror of Dreams

     In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there comes a point in which the vessel reaches an island of darkness, an island at which dreams come true. The crew pulls a desperate, wild man aboard with eyes wide with fear and terror. When he informs to the crew of the nature of the island, most crew members react positively at first, before the man changes their minds saying "Fools! That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I'd better have been drowned or never born! Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams-dreams, do you understand- come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams." (197)". Soon, each crew member recalls a time in which they had a true terror of a dream, and begin to imagine that terror lurking in the darkness. 

    I don't think Lewis wrote this simply to provide a truly scary threat for the reader, but rather to warn of the dangers of dreams/daydreaming. The overt message of this chapter, seemed to be that courage in face of fear can provide an edge needed to beat that fear and move beyond it. The subtext, however, suggests that the dreams of men can often be their own undoing. Following that logic, we see that our "good dreams" can lead us into a dangerous path as we pursue them. This is represented by the crew members remarking early on that if dreams come true on this island that they must be married to their love or their brother still alive. This is a classic character archetype in which the desire for a good thing is coveted and leads to terror. A good example from Tolkien's fiction can be found in Fëanor, an extremely gifted elf who begins to love the creations of his workmanship, namely the silmarils,  with a "greedy" love despite the light captured in the gems never belonging to him, but originating from the trees of Valinor. Ultimately this greed allows Fëanor to be deceived by Melkor and leads to much suffering and death. Perhaps a more popular example could be found in Anakins obsession with saving his beloved which caused him to fall to the Dark Side and become Darth Vader in Star Wars.