Romantic love as an enchanted dream

Romantic love as an enchanted dream is the distinction Laura makes between the spell of an imagined love and her actual feelings for Jim. When he asks how she feels about their relationship, she says, “I think it was the dream itself enchanted me.” Her answer makes the dream, rather than the relationship as it exists, the source of the enchantment—and leaves love itself uncertain.

The Dream and the Relationship

The idea appears amid Laura’s effort to plan what comes next. She feels that the way back to Tyler lies in repetition, while Jim has occupied her nightly nightmares; she is also burdened by what she calls forlorn foregone conclusions. At the family dining table, surrounded by its accumulated history, she longs for a drink to numb her metaphysical unease. This setting frames the romantic question not as a settled declaration but as part of a wider reckoning with patterns, choices, and the pull of the past.

Laura’s Explanation to Jim

In her conversation with Jim, Laura first describes the dream itself as enchanting. Jim says he does not understand, and she identifies the thought as Yeats. His response is to ask directly whether she loves him. Laura puts down her glass, looks at him, and answers, “Sometimes.” The pause and the qualified answer give the concept its force: enchantment can be real as an experience without establishing a steady or unequivocal commitment to the person at its center.

Repetition and Uncertainty

The surrounding narration echoes the scene’s uncertainty through a familiar, bittersweet sense of déjà vu: the feeling is reassuring on the surface and depressing beneath it, as though Laura has been there before and always has been. Her account of enchantment therefore sits beside, rather than resolves, the repeated emotional patterns she recognizes. The passage does not turn the dream into proof of lasting love; instead, it separates the appeal of the romantic ideal from Laura’s wavering answer about Jim.