I assume you are referring to the dream that Winston has
at the beginning of Chapter 3 in this terrifying dystopian novel. What is important to
realise is that this dream of Julia, the girl he has noticed and feels sexually
attracted to, comes after a dream of his mother and sister just before it. The
remembrance of his mother and sister has a profound impact on Winston because through it
he realises that:
Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient
time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members
of a family stood by one another without needing to know the
reason.
However, today,
Winston reflects, such tragedy or emotions would be
impossible:
Such things, he saw, could not happen today.
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex
sorrows.
Of course, we need
to understand that in a sense, Winston is able to live the kind of life he wants to in
his dreams, for such a life would be impossible in the world of Big Brother. It is then
that he has his dream of Julia, which is profoundly
sexual:
With
what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully
aside... What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which
she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to
annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the
Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single movement of
the arm.
What this dream
celebrates and represents is Winston's desire to live life richly and in such a way that
would eradicate the barriers and impediments that control and prevent such passion and
humanness being expressed. The dream recognises the sheer power of humanity which of
course the Party is implacably opposed to. What of course happens in the novel is that
Winston acts on this desire to "live" in spite of the danger.
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