Dreams & Symbolism¶
You know I've been working with the government, Tony. A fish, on a boardwalk, in Big Pussy's voice
Chase uses dreams structurally, not decoratively. They're where characters know things they haven't admitted, and they're the show's biggest formal risk.
The rule¶
Almost every significant dream in the series follows one principle: the unconscious gets there first.
Tony's dreams tell him what he already knows and has refused to think. They are not prophecy and they are not symbolism to be decoded into a message. They're a man's mind processing information his conscious self has declined to accept.
Chase also, importantly, never explains them — and has been openly impatient with the demand that he should.
The major dreams¶
The talking fish — "Funhouse" (S2E26)¶
Feverish with food poisoning, Tony has an extended sequence of dreams culminating in a conversation with a fish on the Asbury Park boardwalk, speaking in Big Pussy's voice, telling him plainly that Pussy has been working with the government.
Tony has spent thirteen episodes not knowing this. The dream knows. He wakes up, confirms it, and Pussy is dead within the hour.
The fish also anticipates the disposal — Pussy goes into the water.
The Test Dream — "The Test Dream" (S5E63)¶
Roughly twenty uninterrupted minutes, the show's most extreme formal experiment before season six.
Tony is hunted through a hotel and a school by his guilt over what he's going to have to do to Tony Blundetto. The dead appear — Pussy, Ralph, Gloria, Mikey Palmice. Annette Bening turns up as herself. A gun keeps going soft in his hand. He can't find the right classroom. His old coach, Molinaro, tells him he never had it.
The classic anxiety dream — unprepared for an exam — applied to a man who is about to murder his cousin.
Kevin Finnerty — "Join the Club" / "Mayham" (S6E67–68)¶
Not a dream: a coma. Two episodes in which Tony is a mild-mannered optics salesman at a conference in Costa Mesa who has lost his wallet and been mistaken for a man named Kevin Finnerty. He can't get home. Monks are furious with Finnerty about a defective heating system. A house on a hill is holding a party he's expected at, and his daughter's voice calls him back.
Gandolfini plays it in a different register entirely — softer, uncertain, un-Tony.
The name is the obvious pun (infinity), and Chase has declined to elaborate on any of it. What it plainly is: a man being shown a life that isn't his and a destination he isn't ready for, and choosing — or being sent — back.
The recurring images¶
Fish and water. Pussy goes in the ocean. The fish speaks. Tony's dreams return to water repeatedly. Being "with the fishes" is the genre's oldest euphemism and the show uses it literally.
Horses. Pie-O-My, the racehorse Tony loves more than most people. Her death in a fire gets Ralph killed — for a horse, not for the woman Ralph murdered, which the show knows is the point. A horse also appears in dreams afterward.
The ducks. Episode one. A family lands in Tony's pool; he becomes besotted; they leave; he collapses. Melfi's reading — fear of losing his family — is right and incomplete. He can love the ducks because they ask nothing of him. The pool returns in season six, when A.J. tries to drown himself in it.
Mirrors and doubles. Kevin Finnerty. The two Tonys. Christopher's Cleaver, in which a mob boss is killed by his protégé, which Tony correctly reads as a confession and can say nothing about.
Bears. A bear appears in the Soprano garden in season five while Tony is out of the house — a walking, breathing metaphor for the absent protector that the show is fully aware is ridiculous, and stages straight.
Christopher's hell¶
"From Where to Eternity" (S2E22), written by Michael Imperioli.
After being shot, Christopher reports a near-death vision: an Irish bar where it's always St. Patrick's Day, where Mikey Palmice and Big Pussy told him the Irish guys win every hand — and a message for Tony. Three o'clock.
Paulie is destroyed by it. His response to a Catholic upbringing that promises hell is not reform but a $50,000 payment to a church and a demand for better terms.
It's the show's funniest and most theologically serious scene at once. See Religion & Morality.
The critical argument¶
The dreams were the show's most divisive element on broadcast. The complaint — that they were self-indulgent and stalled the plot — was widespread, particularly around "The Test Dream" and the Finnerty episodes.
The defense, which has largely won: this is a show about a man in psychoanalysis, in which the unconscious is a legitimate subject, and a series that dramatized therapy for seven years while refusing to dramatize dreams would have been incoherent.
They're also the clearest place the show declines to explain itself — a habit that culminates in an ending constructed the same way.