"The Dream" by Mikal Gilmore is a fantastic short story filled with great descriptions of the lives and deaths of the author's family. This story, from the novel Shot in the Heart, depicts a life of agony, despair, and loneliness. It shows the reader what the life of a man is like that has no close connections to other people, and the key figures in his life, his family, all have an evil nature in his memories.
The author speaks of a recurring dream he has. In this dream it is always night, and he is trapped inside the house he grew up in. He sees his family members as his imagination shows they would be now. But in this dream he cannot leave his house. He is trapped their by a bound he cannot break, and at the beginning does not understand why. .
The narrator of this story is the author, Mikal Gilmore. It is written from his own point of view about the events that happened throughout his life. The author's violent descriptions about each family member and their lives and deaths are meant to show the harshness of his life, and give background as to why each of them is the way they are. This is also used as a way of giving his thoughts about American society and how people can be so easily compelled to do "evil" things of this nature. These descriptions are also an allusion to the end of the dream, where the narrator kills himself with a gun given to him by his brother, Gary. This short story would not have nearly the impact that it does if it were not for the gruesome detail. .
Though this story is from a non-fiction book, the dream is merely the author's way of showing the reader what life is like in a world surrounded by people of this nature. "The Dream" is an excerpt from a novel about the author's brother, a convicted murderer, and his way of "beating the system." This story portrays an evil murderer that convinces his own brother to end his own life in order to join the rest of his family in death.