 Ward suggests that "Composition with Still Life" is the Dickinson work most explicitly presented as a dream through the combination of solid, detailed forms with passages that melt into gaseous substances or dissolve into one another.He observes that this is the first of the large pictures in which there is no central figure whose dream the imagery might depict and that the descent into darkness represents a descent into the artist's unconscious mind "to come to terms with his losses and heal himself.