Talk:Sombrero Wearing Dinosaur/@comment-4650189-20150123123641

"The nightmare played on his head all over again like someone just pressed the rewind button and played it again from the beginning."

Rewinding.

Protagonist has nightmare. Protagonist wakes up in a sweat and sees dinosaur. Dinosaur says that they'd been friends. Dinosaur and protagonist proceed to play together, seeming to form a friendship of sorts (presumably helped by the fact that they had been 'friends' before.) Protagonist goes to school, comes home, and different scenarios occur (perhaps the dream plays out slightly different each time, or the protagonist dreams the end multiple times in one given session. In the former case, it's unclear what would make the dream a nightmare, so it would make sense for it to be the latter. Unless the dream had occurred earlier, but not nearly as frightening, and as the child continued to dream it again and again, it got considerably more gruesome.)

Protagonist wakes up in a sweat and sees dinosaur.

And it's looping like that, maybe forever: rewinding, if you will, in the protagonist's head.

The story would then be kind of silly because it's the dream of a child. Almost certainly a child that is not quite normal, but still, a child. Thus, this nightmare still has the remnances of the machinations of the mind of a child.

Perhaps the part at the very end is simply the nightmare repeating over and over, and an observation that the nightmare will not get better at this point.

And of course, the confusing style of writing, inconsistencies, and bizarre logic would not only be easily explained by the fact it's a dream, but also strengthen the idea. From personal experience, I'd say the way this all plays out is a pretty accurate depiction of how dreams tend to work (for example, 'realizing' the door was open at the last rewind when the protagonist got home is something you would be extremely likely to experience in a dream. Suddenly noticing things that weren't there before and accepting them as having been that way all along is pretty commonplace in the magical world of dream logic.)

You could even go further and say something about the dinosaur lacking mouth movement when it spoke meant something akin to it being just a 'costume' to hide its true self, and how maybe this dream is actually a warped memory of trusting someone the protagonist shouldn't have, but humans tend to be naturally good at making meaning for things like that, so it would probably be best to leave any more speculation to everyone else.