Perry’s dream of the diamond tree and yellow parrot

Perry Smith’s dream of the diamond tree and yellow parrot is a recurring private story in which the pursuit of treasure leads to pain, but never to final defeat. Perry describes a beautiful tree laden with diamonds, a snake he knows will attack him, and a yellow bird that ultimately reverses the danger and carries him to paradise. The dream gives concrete, fantastic form to two ideas he voices in conversation with Dick: that life cannot simply be abandoned because something bad may happen, and that the dreamer’s imagined rescue can outlast the danger itself.

The Dream and Its Bargain

Perry introduces the dream while explaining why foreknowledge did not make him give up riding his motorcycle, despite believing he might crash. His answer is that once an event seems set in motion, a person can hope it will or will not happen, but cannot stop living. The dream makes that argument into a sequence of choices. In an African jungle, Perry moves toward a solitary tree whose blue leaves and diamond-like fruit attract him even though its smell makes him feel sick. He knows in advance that a snake lives among the branches and will fall on him if he reaches for a diamond. He also knows he does not know how to fight it. Still, the treasure matters more to him than the danger, so he reaches.

The expected threat arrives at the moment of possession: Perry has a diamond in his hand when the snake lands on him. Their struggle turns the dream’s promise of wealth into physical vulnerability. The snake crushes him, his legs crack, and it begins swallowing him feet first, like a descent into quicksand. Perry’s account pauses at the point of apparent helplessness. The dream therefore does not present danger as a surprise that can be avoided through ignorance; its force comes from Perry’s advance knowledge and his decision to proceed anyway. The diamond is worth the risk to him, while the snake makes the cost of that decision terrifyingly tangible.

The Yellow Parrot and the Reversal

When Dick asks what happens after the snake swallows him, Perry says the ending is unimportant. The narrative reveals the opposite: the ending matters intensely to him, but he withholds it from Dick because he fears ridicule. He had told the fuller version to Willie-Jay, whom he remembers as delicate-minded and capable of understanding. The distinction is revealing: the bird is not merely an extra flourish in a frightening dream but a cherished image Perry protects from someone whose response he expects to be dismissive.

The yellow parrot first came to Perry when he was seven, after a beating in a California orphanage run by nuns. One punishment for wetting his bed became a remembered scene of violence: a nun woke him with a flashlight, struck him with it, and continued after it broke. In the dream that followed, a bird taller than Jesus, yellow as a sunflower, attacked the nuns, blinded them, and killed them as they pleaded for mercy. It then lifted Perry gently and carried him away to paradise. The sequence converts a child’s helplessness into a fantasy of reversal: the persecutors lose their power, while the battered child is protected and removed from their reach.

A Rescue That Changes with Time

As Perry grows older, the people or forces from whom the bird saves him change. Older children, his father, a faithless girl, and an Army sergeant take the place once occupied by the nuns; the yellow bird remains. The dream’s recurring structure thus accommodates new sources of torment without losing its original rescue. Perry’s account makes the snake’s defeat part of that same structure: although it threatens to devour him, it never completes the act, because the bird always devours the snake instead. The danger is real within the dream, but it is not the last word.

The paradise that follows the rescue has more than one form in Perry’s telling. In one version, it is a feeling: power and a sense of superiority that no one can overcome. In another, it becomes a place he compares to a movie or a remembered image, with white marble steps, fountains, and an ocean visible from the garden’s edge, like the coast near Carmel, California. At its center is a long table loaded with oysters, turkeys, hot dogs, and fruit enough for countless fruit cups. Most important, the food is free. Perry can touch it and eat as much as he wants without fearing its cost. The promised paradise therefore joins escape and triumph to an abundance he does not have to earn or fear losing.

Telling the Dream to Dick

The conversation sets Perry’s imaginative world against Dick’s manner of handling it. As Perry speaks, Dick busies himself with a fork, gouging under his fingernails, and shows little interest in the dream. When Perry refuses to explain the ending, Dick shifts to a dirty joke, and Perry laughs despite his prudishness. The exchange does not erase Perry’s fear of mockery; it shows why he keeps the bird’s victorious ending private from Dick while still participating in their familiar banter.

The narrative gives readers the conclusion Perry denies his companion, turning the withheld ending into the dream’s central disclosure. Its movement—from anticipated attack, through apparent defeat, to rescue and free provision—repeats a pattern Perry has carried from childhood into later conflicts. The fantasy does not prove that he can escape real consequences; instead, it shows how he imagines surviving them: the threat may change, and may even seem to swallow him, but a protective avenger returns him to a place of safety, power, and plenty.