Mostly what I think is great about this fic is that the dream can be viewed several ways:
- As a kind of foretelling of the future. Scully has exhibited clairvoyant abilities in the past.
- As a way of guaging Scully's fears literally, since she certainly has reason to fear global war.
- As her subconscious mind projecting her fears through metaphor. She's dreaming of kids in a war, which makes sense because she's pregnant. Whatever happens in the future will involve her child too, and that's got to be terrifying. She has the impression that someone needs her help, but she can't move, which is probably how she feels about Mulder - he needs her help, but what can she do? Plus she can't remember why she's even there, or what the point of taking hill 470 is - a feeling of hopelessness and confusion which echoes when she wakes up: "She doesn't know why she's in this, anymore, without him."
- Also, the dream could be a reference to the 'past life' that Mulder describes in The Field Where I Died. The war could be the Civil War, which is why all the people around her are described as kids. Plus, in the dream Scully always "sits up against the sandbag and checks to see if her legs are still there. They are, and every time she wonders why she thought they wouldn't be." Scully is supposedly a sergeant in that past life, and she dies on the battle field, though I don't think we're told how. Maybe her/his legs get blown off? I don't know if it's supposed to be a reference to that at all, but if it is it's a powerful indicator of how she feels in her waking life - like the walking dead. Plus it would bring up the question of fate, history repeating itself - perhaps Scully is fated to fight in a war - which ties back in with the first possibility, that her dream is prophetic.
Because of all the possible meaning that can be gotten from it, IIDCZ gets creepier, sadder, and more meaningful every time I read it - kind of like a recurring dream; the longer you live with it, the more you recognize it as a part of you. Except in this case, the longer I think about IIDCZ, the more I recognize it as a part of Scully, and the deeper that part seems to go. The dream is so violent and tangible and consuming that it makes the sudden silence when Scully wakes hard to bear. By only snapping Scully awake at the last moment, Sabine made the dream overpower the reality, so that the reality is what feels somehow unreal.
The last two sentences are what make this fic. I love them. The rest of the fic is good in that it builds up to the finish, but it's only the last two sentences that bring it all together and set IIDCZ in canon, turning it from a nasty bit of war imagery into a complex series of implications about Scully's character, what's happening around her, and inside of her.
no subject
Mostly what I think is great about this fic is that the dream can be viewed several ways:
- As a kind of foretelling of the future. Scully has exhibited clairvoyant abilities in the past.
- As a way of guaging Scully's fears literally, since she certainly has reason to fear global war.
- As her subconscious mind projecting her fears through metaphor. She's dreaming of kids in a war, which makes sense because she's pregnant. Whatever happens in the future will involve her child too, and that's got to be terrifying. She has the impression that someone needs her help, but she can't move, which is probably how she feels about Mulder - he needs her help, but what can she do? Plus she can't remember why she's even there, or what the point of taking hill 470 is - a feeling of hopelessness and confusion which echoes when she wakes up: "She doesn't know why she's in this, anymore, without him."
- Also, the dream could be a reference to the 'past life' that Mulder describes in The Field Where I Died. The war could be the Civil War, which is why all the people around her are described as kids. Plus, in the dream Scully always "sits up against the sandbag and checks to see if her legs are still there. They are, and every time she wonders why she thought they wouldn't be." Scully is supposedly a sergeant in that past life, and she dies on the battle field, though I don't think we're told how. Maybe her/his legs get blown off? I don't know if it's supposed to be a reference to that at all, but if it is it's a powerful indicator of how she feels in her waking life - like the walking dead. Plus it would bring up the question of fate, history repeating itself - perhaps Scully is fated to fight in a war - which ties back in with the first possibility, that her dream is prophetic.
Because of all the possible meaning that can be gotten from it, IIDCZ gets creepier, sadder, and more meaningful every time I read it - kind of like a recurring dream; the longer you live with it, the more you recognize it as a part of you. Except in this case, the longer I think about IIDCZ, the more I recognize it as a part of Scully, and the deeper that part seems to go. The dream is so violent and tangible and consuming that it makes the sudden silence when Scully wakes hard to bear. By only snapping Scully awake at the last moment, Sabine made the dream overpower the reality, so that the reality is what feels somehow unreal.
The last two sentences are what make this fic. I love them. The rest of the fic is good in that it builds up to the finish, but it's only the last two sentences that bring it all together and set IIDCZ in canon, turning it from a nasty bit of war imagery into a complex series of implications about Scully's character, what's happening around her, and inside of her.