After the father has been decapitated in a traffic tunnel, the mother attempts to redeem herself by buying up copies of the fake snuff movie, burning them and spreading the blackened remains on people's satellite dishes. Kristin, incidentally, doesn't have dreams at all, but she does have memories, and in scenes at the beginning and end of the novel she works in a brothel-like hotel in Tokyo, where she sells memories rather than sex. And there's a subplot involving an illicit trade in time capsules. If some of this sounds preposterous, and in summary it inevitably does, then it's a measure of Erickson's skill that he makes the reader suspend disbelief. Partly he does this by having the various stories mesh together at the level of verbal echo and poetic metaphor rather than as linear plot.
Characters drift past one another, tending to avoid big confrontations and emotional conflicts.
In an especially poignant scene, Kristin and her mother meet in passing but fail to recognize each other. Erickson also writes brilliantly sentence by sentence. His prose style is tough and specific. Even when he's evoking a fairly generalized melancholy and malaise, there's a precision and a humanity to his words. It would be hard to make a case that he's saying anything very profound about the nature of millenniums, but that's only to be expected.