Milk Carton Walt

For anyone that missed it first time and never heard about it since, here’s a visual nugget of gold. The moment in question occurred during the episode Everyone Hates Hugo, in Season 2. Hurley was in The Swan Station larder, stuffing his face, and then Jin turned up, speaking English, saying “Everything’s going to change.”

Of course, this all turned out to be a dream.

But if you’d been paying attention to the milk carton, you might have noticed something quite interesting.

(Click image to enlarge)

There’s a picture of Walt, on the side of the milk carton, as a missing child. Quite where the tradition for sticking missing kids on the sides of milk cartons came from in America is not my concern here. But there Walt is. And, if you’ll remember, at this point in Lost we were just a few episodes after the incident where Walt had been taken by The Others – by Tom – from Michael on the raft; he was indeed a ‘missing person’.

The real head-scratcher about all of this is that, at the time of Hurley having this dream, he had no idea that Walt was a ‘missing person’. Hurley, nor anyone else on their side of the Island, knew about what had happened wit Walt, Michael, Sawyer and Jin in the raft. Fundamentally, Hurley was dreaming about something he had no knowledge of at the time.

It's not the only time we have seen this kind of thing happen, either.

Mr. Eko dreamed of Ana Lucia, shot in the gut, before he knew of what had happened to her. And there are all kinds of other examples of this phenomena on Lost. People dreaming about things they could not know about. This does open up all kinds of issues about there being a shared consciousness (for the Jungians amongst you) or some driving force on the Island feeding into the dreams and visions of the survivors, or the time travel nuts will believe this means all of the people are merely on a particular iteration of a time loop on the Island and are ‘remembering’ events that had happened before as they happen again.

Whatever. Personally I thought it was a cool little visual easter egg tucked away for the eagle-eyed that just goes towards making the show feel that little bit richer. Maybe that’s as much as we need to read into it.