Dreams, Memories & Reality

We get into the head of the protagonist in 'The Dreamdrive' by Weike Wang, published in The New Yorker on May 17, 2026. We learnt all about his emotions and thoughts. 

The protagonist battles insomnia and recurring dreams. He isn't on drugs or smoked anything that might lead to hallucinations. There were many dreams about driving, collisions and such. Hence, 'dreamdrive', and its changing landscapes. He saw different doctors but to no avail. His mother, sister and girlfriend tried to decipher his dreams but failed. His girlfriend broke up with him.

His dreams meshed with his memories of his father, who had left the family and country, had totaled many cars due to his numerous accidents. He seemed to subconsciously want to understand his father a little more. He tried to tell his mother and sister about it, but they weren't interested. In fact, his sister didn't like the father very much and told him to stop finding excuses for him, and not to continue the "insidious gaslighting of daughters and mothers".

Thus, one morning, after having fallen asleep at the wheel for the hundredth time and woken up in bed, the man realized that he understood his father a little better. He understood why his father, in his first month in the U.S., had gone out and bought, in all cash, a fourth-hand compact auto with sticky roll-down windows, and why, although he’d had to keep moving the family into progressively smaller rental properties, his father had always made sure that they had access to a car. The car was the American Dream. Yet the car was also a burden, with high monthly interest payments, which put savage masculinity at odds with paternal liability. As soon as the man understood that, he also understood why his father, being the imperfect, self-destructive human that he was, had had no other recourse but to wreck it. And, as soon as the man understood that, he also understood why his father, being the duty bound, self-loathing human that he was, had no other recourse but to fix the car immediately or buy a new one. Had there been fewer totalled cars, his father might have attained home ownership, but then another cycle would have begun—burn the house down, just to build it back up—and it was objectively more arduous to level (and to rebuild) a house than a car. The last car that his father owned had not been totalled. It was not in optimal or even suboptimal condition, but, on roads that were not highways, it was drivable. So, perhaps by leaving that broken but not entirely destroyed piece of equipment to their mother, their father was trying to tell her that he still had hope. Perhaps he was saying that he believed the dream would outlast him.

From all accounts, the protagonist is a terrible driver. By the end of the story, I honestly wasn't sure what was in his real life, and what was in his head. I assumed that somehow, he got into a car accident, and was hospitalized. There was no mention of specific injuries, but he might have hurt his head — trauma to either the skull or brain, or both. We do know that the he was severely sedated, so that would allow him to stay in dreamdrive. Okaaaaayyy.

Every character in this story doesn't have a name, except the father Greg. Even then, Greg isn't his real name. The author had intended it to be so, to emphasize "both the singular and the universal nature of the protagonist's [his] situation." 

In an interview with the same magazine, the author explained her chosen themes in this story.

What we learn about the man’s childhood gives us some clues about the dream: he’s from an immigrant family; cars and driving, for him, are linked to the American Dream. How much of the story is meant to address the general struggle of immigration and cultural assimilation, and how much is just a specific narrative about a specific man? Did you consider this question while writing?

I didn’t explicitly think about immigration and cultural assimilation, but, in most things I write, these subjects naturally come up. The topic I wished to address through this specific man was loneliness. Everyone abandons him, except the doctors and their machines. And, despite the constant availability of modern connectivity, he has no friends or loved ones to talk to about his problems. I feel this way all the time. I feel that my own experiences are unintelligible and/or of little importance to other people, no matter how hard I try to articulate them or how close I thought we were. Ultimately, this has led me to conclude that we are all alone in our plights, and that empathy, real empathy, is hard to find.