Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Dreams, they said, are powerful doses of blended imaginative and realistic images and figures, combined, twisted, reshaped into new ambiguous objects that exist with full colors inside our comfortable hive of our unconscious sleep. How powerful these doses affects us, the fragile but flexible human mind is yet another incredible insight upon unlocking the mysteries of our mind machinery, and particularly, how it influenced Perry, one of the killers with ambiguous motives for a horrific murder in In Cold Blood written by Truman Capote. The dreams he experienced could be classified into two types, the one that the one that directly influenced his choice and the one that influenced his personality which later developed into spontaneous actions

It had created a fail-safe, in case the 'kitten gloves' falls off. There comes the second type of dream. The ones that replicate almost every exact details of Perry's violent sufferings. This is a way of how the subconscious mind tried to use fire against fire. By simulating the experience multiple time in dreams, Perry's mind was forced to be bent and reshaped to be able to not just endure but to fight the experience if signs of it begin to happen again. Nevertheless, this left a dent upon his personality as it was being bent too hard. Perry has a berserker switch in his mind, waiting for the right trigger to unleash all his rage and pain unto others, without any acknowledgment. This twisted berserker rage can be seen confined within the one difference the dreams has accordance to reality, the parrot. In his hard time, Perry was usually visited by the golden parrot, who “had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old” (93). The parrot was like a savior, something, or someone who appeared when he was suffering in rough events, who would protect and give him hope and strength, as well as avenge for him. Starting in a California orphanage, his childhood was filled with adversity, painful memories with nuns who “whipped him for wetting his bed” (93). As in Perry recollection, the bird arrived after one of those beatings, in his description, a bird which “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower” (93). The guardian who will “blended the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy” “(93). In psychology, when something happens in reality that has a great effect, or in Perry’s case, massive damage, people will unconsciously fabricate their imaginary warrior-angel, someone they can count on. This is an instinct wired by evolution to help people adapt to their situations. Dreams are reflections of Perry’s pain