In the short story novel "dream stuff", the rules and restrictions of reality are the lives lived by the characters in these stories. Their lives are ruled by repetitiveness, routine and discomfort. These stories show that dreams, fantasy and childhood in an ideal world of innocence and freedom are their only way to a relief from the rules and restrictions they endure in everyday life.
In the story "closer", this looks at a young girls named Amy who is a Pentecostal, which is a fundamentalist version of Christianity. Although she has strict rules to live by, she dreams about space and has fantasies of someday being an astronaut and really loves her uncle's car and it reminds her or a spaceship. She has dreams of her exiled uncle Charles, coming back to the house in his "spaceship" and coming over the right side of the fence and embracing everyone. She dreams to tell this is what she wants but knows she can't have, but she believes in her dreams and in return strays the beliefs of her church and the words of her grandpa and rejects the values she knows of casting out. Her Uncle Charles has a very fun loving personality when he rings up on the phone to say of his progress when he is on his way to pay his family a visit. Uncle Charles has a BMW that is silver which is a perfect example of pleasure and fun loving, symbolizes wealth. Although these fantasies and dreams are quite contrary, they are of course struck down when you look at when they are met with the truth of reality.
In the Pentecostal religion, they have rejected modern lifestyles and believe that all that is written in the book (bible) is true and will claim their lives to it. Although Amy dreams and fantasizes about amazing things. She seems to have no opinion for herself, even young and childhood is seen as a faze of innocence in one life, Amy's beliefs and dreams are derived from her Grandfathers influence, she seems to Reiterate everything that her grandfather says, you can tell this by the words she uses through it lacking the touch of an innocent child, when she says "next year when I am ten I can think for myself and resist the influences", is obviously the words from someone else.
