What is the significance of the author's dream about her mother that she recounts at the beginning and end of the memoir? How is the dream a representation of her feelings of guilt?

The reader should recall that the book begins and ends with a recurring dream the author frequently has that loosely recreates the scene of her mother's murder. In the dream, she sees Joel and greets him, just as she did the night of the football game when she inadvertently saved her own life simply by saying hello. Trethewey believes that if Joel had killed her that night, her mother might have lived, so she feels guilty for surviving when Gwendolyn did not. In the dream, her mother asks, "Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?" (3), a question that speaks to the author's ongoing struggle to process her trauma...