Coma

The Big Sleep was always death, but it would perhaps be a better description of coma. I wonder whether Danny could, as a result of a car accident or a disease, be plunged into a coma - and so into a potentially inescapable dreamland.

I had a thought about him reaching a point (a bit like It's A Wonderful Life) whee he feels his parents – specifically his Mum – aren't interested in him. He feels depressed and taken for granted. Perhaps there's something going on with his parents he isn't aware of, or which he only vaguely understands, and it means they're distracted. Their love and approval is so important to him, this new distraction feels like a betrayal.

Is the new distraction a pregnancy? Or some problem that's arisen – a 'grown-ups issue'?

By the time whatever event it is occurs, and he enters the coma, he feels pushed aside and forgotten – and he's also become familiar with dreamland, to the point where it offers a useful escape for him. But the coma means it's an escape he may never be able to undo. Lots of children feel they want to escape their parents – but would be terrified if they were to succeed, for good.

In the coma, Danny comes to face death, and/or his fear of death. I'll do a separate post about this sequence, which I've had going round in my head for a while. But he also comes to the Room of Strange Doorways, and is allowed access to his mother's dreams.

His mother, of course, is in hell: her cherished child is hovering at death's door. In her dreams, which focus entirely on this dread and nascent grief, he is shocked and terrified by her feelings – he had no idea she could feel this way. He sees her love for him: a well as deep as the stars. And her fear for him: a flint blade pressed to her heart. This is where he discovers there is no world as foreign as the inside of someone else's head – but also the truth about how human beings carry each other around within themselves.

It's this astonishing discovery that inspires his climb out of the coma.