Dreams and nightmares

Dreams and nightmares give form to Apollo Kagwa’s fear and longing after Brian West disappears, then return in altered form when Apollo himself becomes a father. The most important dream is not simply frightening: it stages the father’s departure as an invitation to follow, and reveals that the child’s distress comes from wanting to be taken along. Years later, the same fog, rushing water, and summons enter Apollo’s sleep again, now in a life shared with Emma Valentine and their infant son, Brian Kagwa. The recurrence makes an old absence present without resolving it.

The childhood nightmare

The first recurring nightmare begins soon after Brian West vanishes. Apollo is four, too young to give Lillian Kagwa a clear account, so she pieces together the scene from his frightened babble. A man knocks at the apartment door; Apollo unlocks it, and the stranger pushes inside. The man kneels before him and removes his face, revealing Brian West beneath it. The familiar face does not make the encounter safe. Brian opens his mouth, and fog pours from his throat until it fills the apartment. He picks up Apollo as the sound of rushing water grows, then carries him through the mist. At the moment the dream seems to offer reunion, it also threatens to remove the child from the world he knows.

The dream’s repeated words sharpen that threat and its emotional ambiguity: Brian tells Apollo, “You’re coming with me.” Apollo wakes screaming. The sentence can sound like a promise of closeness, but its force comes from a father who has already disappeared and now appears to take his son somewhere beyond the fog. The dream supplies no explanation for Brian’s absence; instead, it turns that unanswered fact into an encounter Apollo must relive. Its supernatural, bodily images—the face taken off, the cloud from the throat, the waterfall-like noise—make the missing father both recognizable and strange.

The nightmare visits Apollo night after night for weeks. He becomes unwilling to sleep, while Lillian stays awake knowing that her four-year-old will again wake in terror. When she asks why the words make him cry out, Apollo explains that the feeling is not fear but longing. His question, “Why didn’t he take me with him?” reveals the wound beneath the nightmare: the child experiences his father’s disappearance not only as loss, but as being left behind. The distinction changes the meaning of the dream’s most alarming gesture. Apollo wants the father who carries him away, even though the dream makes that imagined reunion frightening.

Eventually the nightmare passes, or Apollo stops talking about it. The silence does not bring Brian back. Life settles into a demanding routine: Lillian works full time, takes Saturday classes to become a legal secretary, and raises Apollo alone. Apollo grows bookish, self-contained, and watchful. For eight more years, mother and son do not speak of Brian West; by Apollo’s twelfth birthday, neither expects him to become a subject again. The dream thus belongs to a childhood that appears to recede, but the story’s later repetition shows that the father’s absence has not become irrelevant simply because it has gone unspoken.

The dream returns in adulthood

Years later, an episode of Apollo’s sleep reworks the childhood scene with greater detail. The adult dream begins with a man knocking while Apollo is in the living room. Apollo turns all three locks of the apartment door before opening it. The visitor has blue skin, eyes but no nose or mouth; he forces his way in, kneels, and peels away that surface to reveal Apollo’s father. Unlike the child in the earlier account, this Apollo smiles and hugs him. Yet the embrace does not undo the dream’s violence: Apollo’s father holds him tightly and makes him watch as white fog spills from his mouth and fills the apartment. He picks Apollo up and walks with him into the mist.

The changed details make the dream a repetition, not a simple replay. The locked door gives Apollo an attempted barrier; the strange blue face delays recognition; the smile and hug offer a moment of welcome. But the father still controls the encounter, and Apollo is still carried into the fog. The dream’s final words repeat the childhood summons, “You’re coming with me.” It ends not with explanation or reunion in waking life, but with Apollo’s abrupt awakening. He expects to be back in Queens as a boy, then recognizes that his wife and baby are beside him in bed. Emma is breastfeeding Brian with her eyes half closed. Apollo turns his back to them and cannot fall asleep again.

Parenthood, exhaustion, and recurring images

The return occurs amid severe sleep loss. At one point, six months without much sleep is contrasted with three months: the mind grows swampy, the body sluggish, and even Kim Valentine is startled by how depleted Emma looks. Emma later tells Kim that Apollo has started having nightmares. Apollo takes Brian out in the morning, giving Emma a chance to rest, but Emma says she does not sleep while they are gone and does not sleep at all. The family’s exhaustion is therefore shared, though it takes different forms: Apollo’s nightmares, Emma’s sleepless vigilance, and Kim’s recognition of how worn down her sister has become.

The old dream’s water imagery also returns in a waking crisis, though the scene is not presented as another dream. Chained to a kitchen chair in his own New York City apartment, Apollo experiences himself as submerged: he feels sunk, waterlogged, and unable to see or feel clearly. A stranger’s screaming becomes a point of orientation, a sound he can move toward through the darkness of his confusion. When he finally opens his eyes, he understands that he is in his kitchen, sweating and chained to a chair, with a U-lock around his throat. The passage again makes water and sound the terms through which Apollo experiences terror and finds his way back to consciousness, while firmly locating the danger in his physical surroundings.

Significance and limits

Across these episodes, the dreams connect two stages of Apollo’s life without treating them as identical. As a child, he longs for a father who has disappeared; as an adult, he wakes beside his own wife and son, carrying the remembered summons into a household shaped by new parenthood and exhaustion. The dream’s return makes the contrast unavoidable: Apollo once asked why his father did not take him, and later, while holding Brian, promises, “No matter what happens, you’re coming with me.” The repeated phrase has changed direction. What sounded like an unexplained summons from an absent father becomes Apollo’s own pledge to his child.

The book leaves the nightmare’s meaning unsettled. Its images are vivid and recur, but the evidence does not establish that the childhood dream predicts events or that its father is literally present. Its clearest revelation is emotional: Apollo’s terror contains a child’s longing to be chosen, while his later promise expresses a determination not to leave his son behind. Fog obscures sight; rushing water overwhelms speech; screaming, by contrast, can guide Apollo toward awareness. Through those repeated images, dreams and nightmare-like states register what the characters cannot easily settle into conversation: the continuing pressure of Brian West’s absence and the responsibilities Apollo now bears as a father.