What Dreams May Come Analysis

Great Essays
What Dreams May Come
Grief, Bereavement, & Suicide This is a critical analysis paper using academic literature to analyze the movie “What Dreams May Come.” The topic to be analyzed is grief, bereavement and Suicide. This movie gives us a serious picture of the cost of grief, bereavement. This movie is also about the suicide of the wife, because of her loss of first her children and later her husband to car accidents. Depression and a sense of hopelessness often precede suicide attempts. The loss of a loved one can be experienced as so unbearable that the survivor is tempted to “join” the deceased. Recently bereaved people often experience the presence of the dead and reunion fantasies may have some temporary value while bereaved individuals
…show more content…
People make their own choices and decide to live for themselves. This disconnection leads to Annie living with her own innermost demons in her mind, and when she commits suicide she loses herself in darkness and the only place she can go from here is to the pits of Hell, (Hell is best described in this movie as looking like Dante’s inferno) only because at this point she is incapable and unwilling to perceive the light. (Cownie)
Soul-mates
What Dream may come is based on the 1978 novel by author Richard Matheson, tells a story about a man named Chris Nielsen whose love for his wife and soul mate named Annie is so powerful it transcends heaven and hell. Almost from the start of the movie this couple lose their children in a car accident and they are forced to cope and deal with the loss of their children, Annie’s depression from the grief of losing her children causes a mental breakdown, “Riches and Dawson have shown how the loss of a child has deep, long-lasting outcomes for one’s idea of self and other personal relations.” With the threat of divorce Annie fights her way back from the depression. Chris suddenly dies in an accident and Annie is thrust back into a deeper depression and the loss is too much for her to

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Once Blake had told Annie that he had fallen in love with another woman, she had decided that she would go back to a place where she could find love within other family members, her home town. While she’s there, she reconnects with her first love who had just lost his wife along with his young daughter who is slowly disappearing. Annie starts to help them both by trying to heal them along with herself. Yet, when she believes that everything is finally going to be okay, she gets stuck with a choice that anyone in her position shouldn’t have to make.…

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dreams and Deception: Sports Lure, Racism, and Young Black Males’ Struggle in Sports and Education Dreams and Deception by Isabel Ann Dwornik, which was published on January 31, 2017. I chose this book because I felt that people should be more aware of how young black males view a career in sports as a way out of their financial situation. I didn’t want to choose and everyday biography about an athlete. I wanted to read and introduce an everyday problem that doesn’t get as much attention as it should.…

    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Annie feels drowned in the water that embodies her mother, the once beautiful relationship that had, is quickly depleting. Towards the end of the book, Annie struggles with depression. She dreams: "All the water from the sea filled me up, from my toes to my head, and I swelled up very big. But then little cracks began to appear in me and the water started to leak out… I burst open. The water ran back and made up the sea again, and again I was walking in the warm soot – only this time wet and in tatters and not going anywhere in particular."…

    • 739 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dream Of Freedom Analysis

    • 800 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Every author, regardless of what genre, shares one common characteristic: the desire for their books to come to life in the mind of the reader. Authors try to achieve this goal in a variety of ways. For example, an author might use relatable, real-life situations to keep readers interested in the story. Others will add several twists and turns within the plot to play with the reader’s emotions and make them want to come back and read more. There are also several authors that use extremely strong descriptions to enhance the reader’s ability to visualize the story they are trying to portray.…

    • 800 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs gives first person account of a female slave struggle with sexual oppression. Harriet Jacobs used the pseudonym when narrating because she wanted to protect her family. Harriet Jacobs use of a distinctive double-consciousness to make aware of the multiple identities one as an African American female slave has to develop a sense of self. It is my argument here Jacobs makes use of double-consciousness by using a pseudonym to show there was more to slavery and puts the divisions between gender on a stage. Harriet Jacob’s autobiography is a popular female eighteenth-century slave narrative.…

    • 1031 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In line 4, “What I can use an empty heart-cup for”, Annie basically is saying that in her heart there is no more love, which is a metaphor. She is comparing her void heart to an empty cup. This pushes the author’s point that Annie is feeling hopeless, devoid of any emotion but grief. Another form of figurative language used is personification in lines 4 and 5, “Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange/Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)...”. There are two examples in these lines, both fitting together to make a cohesive message.…

    • 536 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Lost Names Essay

    • 965 Words
    • 4 Pages

    This shows the emotional state of the protagonist’s family, as they lost their names. This state of humiliation and sadness is expressed in the novel through the use of language associated with sadness, such as “weeping”, “crying”, and “tears” which often appear throughout the book. Even if, since it is a fictional book, it does not contain completely true events from the writer’s life, the story nevertheless reflects a historical truth regarding a time of national…

    • 965 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    One of the most tragic things about the human existence is the fact that it comes to an end. There is an unfortunate cliché that seems to circulate before someone passes away, both in real life and in popular media. It can be summarized into one simple statement: “I wish I had the chance to . . .” Essentially, the feeling that is expressed is the feeling of regret, which can only be resolved by the process of redemption. The characters of Khaled Hosseini’s novel…

    • 2033 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Langston Hughes Diction

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The loss of a dream takes a turn on someone which can be shown through the use of imagery. The melancholy a person experiences when they lose a dream is expressed in one other main way throughout the literary works created by…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Dreamers Research Paper

    • 734 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Yuli Juarez Mini-Essay #1: DREAMers-A Movement for Social Justice The DREAMers are a group of undocumented individuals who came into the United States before the age of 16 but were under the age of 35 when the DREAM Act pass. The Dream activists have created a variety of movements and organizations to stand in solidarity with the DREAMers (undocumented youth) and their families. The document describes a range of issues concerning the public thus motivating them to bring more awareness to the diagnosis of the problems that their community is experiencing. These activist believe that the “immigration system is broken” thus causing them to receive unfair treatment because of their immigration status, limited access to education, and family…

    • 734 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The book This Naked Mind is based on the true story of Annie Grace, who recalls her life of addiction to alcohol. She recounts her steps to sobriety all within her own power, by changing her unconscious and conscious thoughts. “Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it” – Echart Tolle (p. 26, para 2). Before Annie 's sobriety, she believed as many people do, that in order to become sober it would mean a life of misery and constant struggles.…

    • 1328 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell,” emphasizes the role that dreams play in the narrator’s life. This traditional sonnet is included in the collection, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” that introduces the narrators as young soldiers recently returned from war. Favored by writers in the Harlem Renaissance, Brooks wrote the collection in strict sonnet format with iambic pentameter. Yet, the poem does not mirror the rigidity of the sonnet because of Brooks’ careful use of enjambment. Written in the present tense, with a final couplet in the hypothetical future, Brooks’ poem does not have a concrete sense of past.…

    • 1379 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Annie’s mother’s betrayal causes Annie to not only change the idea of the world Annie wants to…

    • 1073 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the novel, Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi is about a prostitute who faced a life of childhood cruelty, neglect, violent relationship, and welcomes death to be free from pain/suffering. In the graphic novel, Chicken with Plums, by Marjane Satrapi, is about a musician who frantically searches to fix his instrument to recover his first lost love but settles for death. In the play, “M. Butterfly”, is about a French diplomat who falls in love with the submissive, traditional, stereotypical “women” by creating an ultimate fantasy. In these three texts, the authors are challenging by interconnecting the social norms and death, which is demonstrated using gender studies.…

    • 1424 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the studied account of Liu Dapeng life by Henrietta Harrison, The Man Awakened from Dreams takes the reader on a journey through the history of China during the 19th and 20th century through a first-hand account of Dapeng’s writings from the time of 1891 up until his death in 1942. Dapeng was a Confucian scholar and teacher who held onto his Confucian beliefs he had gained during his youth throughout his life while China in retrospect changed drastically. Dapend grew up in the village of Chiqiao located in northern China in Shanxi province. Dapeng 's writings were never published and without Harrison 's discovery Liu Dapeng may have faded away in history unrecognized. Through the analysis of Dapeng’s writings the reader is able to better…

    • 777 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays

Related Topics