Delmore Schwartz writes In Dream Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories to explore familial relations and the ineffable qualities of time. The protagonist is a young man who awakens watching a film in a dark theater. He doesn't understand what's happening or why. As the film progresses, however, he quickly realizes that the main characters are his parents when they were young, before their marriage. He observes how their relationship formed and changed each one. Suddenly, the kid awakens in his own bed on his twenty-first birthday. It was all a dream.
Through this dream, the protagonist comes to understand the immense weight of responsibility, as the book's title suggests. He recognizes how radically different his parents' lives are now, after marriage and children. They have become ghosts of themselves, subject to the needs of their children. With his peculiar form of hindsight, the protagonist wills his parents not to marry each other in the film. He understands that they're losing something in this union -- that it will not end well for them. Nevertheless, the protagonist is incapable of effecting the past, only of witnessing.
The protagonist is young enough to just have started embarking on his life's journey. He is currently being faced with critical decisions of family and career. Viewing the dream as a gift, he reconsiders the direction he was heading in his own life to account for the horror which he witnesses in his parents lives. Perhaps he is not prepared to sacrifice for children and a wife. In retrospect, he recognizes the painful irony of time, which only ever marches forward. In order to prevent regrets like he now knows his parents must possess, the young man determines to proceed with caution.
