Obviously, Linda has never been able to assimilate into
the civilization at the Indian Reservation. After she has ruined one of the weaving
looms and she has offended the woman so much that they have beaten her because she has
slept with their men thinking that "everyone belongs to everyone" as she has been
conditioned to do so, it is clear that her hypnopoedia has been effective. Linda is
truly a product of her environment and desires to return to it. But, her return to
civilization is futile:
The return to ciilization was for her the return
to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday
after holiday, wihtout ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting,
without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as
though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up yhour
head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The
holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not
intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the
holiday.
Linda longs for the
escape that the New World offers from pain, from guilt, from life. Soma
sends her into the world of "real acetate silk." (Silk is silk, not acetate,
a synthetic material.) Having known the real world, Linda now wishes to escape
it.
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