What does Winston learn about love and loyalty from the dream about the paperweight?

The glass paperweight is a significant item that Winston Smith purchases from Mr. Charrington's antique shop. It symbolically represents his love for and loyalty to Julia. Similar to this love and loyalty, the precious paperweight is fragile, transparent, unique, and rare. The coral encased in glass is unique and hard to find in Oceania, making it similar (in this respect) to Winston and Julia's genuine love for each other. In Oceania's society, meaningful relationships are nonexistent or rare. Unfortunately, Winston's and Julia's love is not hidden from the Thought Police; the transparent glass surrounding the coral from the Indian Ocean seems to symbolize this constant surveillance. The couple's love and loyalty to one another is also symbolically represented by the paperweight's durability. Similar to how the paperweight is shattered into numerous pieces by the Thought Police when they arrest Winston and Julia, the love they share is also fragile and does not last long once Winston is imprisoned in the Ministry of Truth. In Room 101, Winston betrays Julia in order to avoid being eaten alive by ferocious rats. Similar to the shattered glass paperweight, Winston's and Julia's love and loyalty are jeopardized by the Party's brutal methods of torture.

In 1984, what does Winston's dream about the paperweight reveal about his views on love and loyalty?

Winston remembers his dream as follows:

It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by—indeed, in some sense it had consisted in—a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter blew them both to pieces.

The paperweight is an important symbol. It represents the pockets of refuge and love in Winston's life. We know that it symbolizes to Winston the room above Mr. Charrington's shop, because Winston tell us this. Now, his dream leads him to understand that his childhood home with his mother was another place in his life connected with the symbol of the paperweight, the symbol of love. His childhood is part of the secret, internal world that the Party can't eradicate (yet) or understand.

The gesture of an arm protecting a loved one becomes, like the paperweight, another potent symbol of the world apart from the Party and Big Brother. Later in the chapter, Winston recognizes the love his mother bestowed on both Winston and his sister in the image of her arm around Winston's dying sister:

His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast.

Winston realizes that love and loyalty are what makes him and other people—like the prole hanging the laundry—truly human and alive.

The moving dream that Winston has in this chapter shows us the true conditions of the time when Big Brother was establishing his power base and the resulting hunger and general want that his citizens suffered. His memory of stealing the small bit of chocolate that his mother insisted belonged to his sister and running away shows his guilt about the disappearance of his mother and sister. Reflecting on his mother, Winston thinks about her private standards and how they bestowed upon her a kind of "nobility" and "purity." Note what he learns about love and loyalty from this memory:

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it.

Love is an instinctive response, that, Winston reflects, has been bred out of life by the Party and Big Brother. Love is something that is always there and can always be offered, even when nothing else remains.