The Face on the Milk Carton

Janie’s dreams are a frequent motif in the novel. Even before she finds the milk carton, Janie shows a tendency to daydream. Her dreaminess precedes the start of the novel by at least a year: the narrator reveals that “Her last-year’s daydream—before a driver’s license absorbed all daydream time—had been about her own future family” (4). Many of Janie’s daydreams are positive. In the novel’s first chapter, for instance, Janie daydreams about the freedom of driving a car and different spellings of her name instead of paying attention in class.

Once Janie learns of her probable kidnapping, though, the nature of her daydreams changes from harmless to disturbing. She also begins having nightmares. Janie’s upsetting dreams, which she sometimes struggles to distinguish from memories of her childhood, come on suddenly: “She had always had control over her daydreams” Janie thinks, before learning of her kidnapping (22). But that knowledge brings visions that “crawled out of her brain like a creature of the dark” (23); “Monsters and hideous, evil, sucking things scattered in her brain” (93). Janie’s dreaminess is a character trait that makes her particularly vulnerable to anxiety about her kidnapping and its repercussions.