Perry Smith’s parrot dream

Perry Smith’s parrot dream is a recurring childhood vision that gives form to both remembered persecution and an imagined escape from it. The yellow bird first appeared when Perry was seven, after a beating in the California orphanage where he lived as a child; years later, the bird still returned as an avenger and rescuer, changing its enemies as Perry’s life changed.

Origins and Structure

Perry describes a longstanding dream in which he travels through an African jungle toward a solitary tree covered in blue leaves and diamonds. The tree is beautiful but foul-smelling, and he knows before reaching for its fruit that a snake guards it. He wants the diamonds more than he fears the snake, so he reaches up, takes one, and is attacked. The snake crushes him, cracks his legs, and begins swallowing him feet first. Perry stops short of recounting the dream’s conclusion to Dick, who has shown little interest; the withheld ending is, however, the part that matters most to him.

The Bird as Avenger and Rescuer

The bird’s first appearance is tied to a specific childhood terror. Perry was seven, a hated, hating mixed-race child in a California orphanage run by nuns who disciplined him for wetting the bed. After one beating, a nun struck him repeatedly with a flashlight, continuing even after it broke. In sleep, the yellow bird arrived as a warrior-angel: taller than Jesus, sunflower-colored, and armed with a beak that blinded the nuns and consumed their eyes. After killing them as they begged for mercy, it lifted Perry gently and carried him away to paradise. The dream reverses the helplessness of the beating: the child who could not stop the blows is rescued by a force capable of turning his persecutors’ violence back upon them.

The persecutors change as Perry grows older, but the bird’s role remains. Older children, his father, a faithless girl, and an Army sergeant take the nuns’ place as sources of torment; against each, the bird continues to hover as an avenger. The dream’s ending also completes the danger posed by the snake: it never finishes swallowing Perry, because the bird devours it instead. Perry’s threatened descent thus gives way to an ascent into safety and power, joining the jungle ordeal to the rescue he had withheld from Dick.

Paradise and the Dream’s Changing Form

The rescue does not end merely with escape from the snake. The bird devours the creature that had been swallowing Perry, reversing the dream’s threatened outcome, and then carries him upward. Paradise takes different forms in Perry’s accounts: at times it is only a feeling, an experience of power and invulnerable superiority; in another version, it is a place he imagines he may have seen in a movie. That landscape has white marble steps, fountains, and an ocean visible from its edge, compared to the coast around Carmel, California.

The dream’s promised safety becomes most concrete in its abundance of food. Perry imagines a long table loaded with oysters, turkeys, hot dogs, and fruit enough to make a million fruit cups; everything is free, and he can eat without fearing the cost. The contrast is sharp: the jungle’s beautiful diamonds are guarded by a snake, while paradise offers food that can be touched and consumed without danger or payment. The bird’s deliverance therefore joins revenge to refuge, and the final vision of abundance gives the child’s escape from persecution a material as well as a fantastic form.

The Dream as a Test of Trust

Perry Smith’s account of the dream also reveals how selectively he shares it. While telling Dick about the diamond tree and the snake, he notices Dick gouging beneath his fingernails with a fork, apparently uninterested; when Dick asks how the dream ends, Perry withdraws the part he values most, unwilling to risk having the bird mocked. He had previously confided the ending to Willie-Jay, whose delicacy and sympathy had allowed him to understand it. The contrast makes the dream more than a private fantasy: telling it becomes a measure of whether another person can be trusted with Perry’s vulnerability. Dick instead turns the exchange toward a dirty joke, which Perry laughs at despite his own prudishness; the easy laughter does not erase the gulf between Dick’s joking response and the understanding Perry had found with Willie-Jay.