Mermaids

Mermaids are figures in Clare’s dreams, most notably on the morning she is to marry Henry. Their ability to breathe underwater becomes an image of learning to inhabit an unfamiliar form, while the dream’s interruption by thoughts of marriage connects transformation to Clare’s fear of losing a desired future. The mermaid motif also belongs to a wider pattern in which dreams give shape to her longing for a child.

The Wedding-Morning Dream

Clare wakes in her childhood bed on her wedding day, briefly unsure of where she is in time. In a dream, she is a mermaid learning from another mermaid how to breathe underwater. She struggles until she realizes that she, like her teacher, has gills in her neck; once she understands this, swimming becomes easier and feels like flying.

A small sailboat carries Clare’s mother on the ocean’s surface. When her mother reminds her that she is supposed to be getting married that day, Clare suddenly believes that being a mermaid means she cannot marry Henry, and she begins to cry. She wakes in the middle of the night, then imagines a different ending: she becomes an ordinary woman again and can marry. The dream therefore places a moment of estrangement from ordinary human life beside the marriage she wants, and resolves the conflict through an imagined return to human form.

A Motif of Transformation

The dream’s movement from difficulty to adaptation is specific: Clare initially cannot manage underwater breathing, then discovers that she has the gills she needs. Its comparison of swimming to flying makes the new body a source of possibility as well as confusion. The scene does not explain the dream as prophecy; instead, its shifting logic lets wedding-day anxiety take the form of a temporary incompatibility between mermaid life and marriage.

Clare’s waking revision of the dream draws on The Little Mermaid but rejects its painful costs. She imagines becoming human without suffering pain in her feet or losing her tongue, distancing her desired transformation from the familiar tale’s punishments. In her account, the mermaid image can be set aside so that marriage remains possible.

Dreams and the Desire for a Child

Mermaids are not the only dream figures through which Clare’s hopes take shape. About two years into her marriage, she and Henry decide to see whether they can have a baby. Clare knows Henry is pessimistic about their chances, but avoids asking why, including whether his time-travel difficulties might be hereditary or affect a pregnancy. She describes herself as consumed by the idea of a baby and imagines one resembling Henry, with black hair and intense eyes.

In this period, her dreams repeatedly produce unexpected images of babies: she finds a very small shoe in a tree nest, discovers that an object she thought she was holding is a baby, or encounters babies living at the bottom of a lake. The mermaid dream’s ocean and the later lake imagery thus share a dream setting, but the narrative does not identify the babies as mermaids or establish a literal connection between the images. Together, the scenes show Clare’s imagination turning uncertainty and desire into vivid, recurring dream forms.

Narrative Significance

The mermaid episode is framed as Clare’s dream rather than as an event in the external plot. Its placement on the wedding morning makes marriage the immediate stake: the dream briefly denies Clare the future she expects, then her waking imagination restores it. The later baby dreams extend this pattern from the question of whether Clare can marry Henry to whether they can become parents. In both, dreams give emotional uncertainty a concrete shape without resolving the real uncertainties that surround the couple’s future.