Dreaming & the Moral of the Story

I can never quite remember my dreams when I wake up in the morning, but a few nights ago I did have a pretty horrifying dream... or nightmare, I guess. In the dream, I was living in Bozeman, going to MSU and taking all the same classes. I knew all the same people, had all the same professors and all the same friends. But there was one minor detail. Everyone was a zombie. It was similar to the movie Zombieland only it was not humorous in the least. And I'm not sure why but Dwight from the Office was in my dream (as a zombie, of course) and there was not escaping the fleshing-eating monsters that were wreaking havoc on the Montana State University campus. I'm not sure why I had such a vivid dream on a Thursday night, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that I had spicy food right before bed (does that usually induce nightmares....?). One of the scarier moments from my dream is when my (zombie) roommate came home and threw my French Press against the wall, where is shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces... and I shed a single, solitary tear that glistened from my cheek.

Now onto the literature side of things...
I read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings a couple weeks ago (just for kicks) and spent what seemed like forever trying to analyze and dissect what the story really "meant" with my boyfriend. And to be honest, I was a little stumped. I guess the supposed moral of the story I came up with is that this old man/angel represents earthly imperfections and how we tend to disbelieve anything that doesn't fit the description of how we had originally perceived it to be. I mean, think about what comes to mind when you think of the word "angel" or "angelic". I'm sure whatever comes into anyone's mind isn't an elderly, haggard man with large wings living in a chicken coop. But in reality, I think if an interviewer were to ask Gabriel Garcia Marquez what the moral of this story is, he would say something close to what Professor Sexson said in class: "The moral of the story is the story". If the reader picks out one lesson from the story and assumes that is why it was written, then the reader is almost insulting the author by oversimplifying the story. Just like how Arnold Friend doesn't fit one description. Oates' even said in an interview that Friend is an array of characters all wrapped into one... and how if you answer "Arnold Friend is the Devil" on a test, you know you're going to get it wrong.