They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true.
Chapter 3 · Narrator
Context
After George, Candy, and Lennie have done the arithmetic of pooling their resources and concluded that the farm is financially within reach, the three men fall silent in shared astonishment.
Analysis
The pluperfect 'had never really believed in' performs a strange retroactive disenchantment—the dream becomes real precisely at the moment the narrator reveals it was never believed, so belief and realization arrive together as a single conjoined event. The collective subject 'they' replaces individual interiority with shared cognition, a rare moment of communion in a novel structured around isolation. The verb 'coming true' (passive on the dream's part, active on no one's) suggests the dream materializes itself; Steinbeck withholds an agent, and that grammatical gap is where the catastrophe will enter.
How to Use in Essay
Support a thesis that Steinbeck makes the dream feel most real at the exact moment he flags it as least believed—this paradox primes the reader to understand that in Of Mice and Men, belief and realization are inversely correlated, so the moment of greatest hope is structurally also the moment of imminent loss.