“Dream House as Déjà Vu” in Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House”

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a book that speaks into the silence surrounding queer domestic abuse. As well, her memoir details, through Machado’s stylistic choices, the cyclic nature of domestic abuse and the feelings of being trapped within an abusive relationship. Machado achieves this feeling in various ways, most notably through the use of a choose your own adventure section where the reader must actively participate in breaking the cycle of abuse and leaving the relationship. By having the reader engaged in this section, Machado causes the reader to attach themselves to the cylical nature of abuse. Machado achieves this in other vignettes as well, and today I want to look at the ways she uses “Dream House as Déjà Vu” to illuminate the progression of abuse and its cyclical nature.

Over the course of the memoir, there are three vignettes entitled “Dream House as Déjà Vu.” When I think about experiencing déjà vu, I think about a dream that I had then living that dream, sometimes month laters, in my waking moments. It is a feeling of having been somewhere and experiencing something before, a repetition, a cycle. It is an uneasy experience, one that feels, to a certain extent unmooring because you may be grasping at something that ground you and reassure you that you are, in fact, experiencing is reality.