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Dreams are a strange phenomenon: often a bore of conversation in real life, when they are transformed into fiction, they become the foundation of some of our most engaging literature. From the fantasies of Wonderland by Lewis Carroll to the horrors of Stephen King, the authors have a long colorful story to describe and convert dreams, to create a window in psyches and in our time.
Three recently published books – non -fiction, fiction and poetry – retrace the link between these inconvenience's stories, and the fears and the awakened disturbances that nourish them.
Charlotte Beradt The third dream of dreams: the nightmares of a nationTo be republished this month by Princeton University Press, asks what is happening when reality infects and changes the dreams of ordinary people. Beradt's investigation was published for the first time in the 1960s, in German and then in English. The new translation of Damion Searls revives this almost forgotten but extremely perceptive text.
Four weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Beradt, based in Berlin, lost his job as a journalist, joining the many intellectuals who were served, imprisoned or otherwise taken from the way while the Nazis took control of Germany. Beradt and her husband were briefly imprisoned. Even after their release, unemployment and in danger, the fears of Beradt pursued her in dreams – and she was inspired to start documenting the dreams of others.
In 1939, when she and her husband fled in the United States, finding a shelter with Hannah Arendt and other exiles, Beradt had collected around 300 dreams, having traveled Berlin for people who were ready to share the anxieties that followed them beyond sleep. “The things that have filled my dreams must also fill theirs,” she recalls in an article from 1943 for the free world magazine, “the breath of breath through the fields, hiding at the top of the dizzying height towers, curl up below in the graves, everywhere the storm soldiers with my heels”.
As Beradt observed: “The scarcity of dreams of revenge is notable.” And yet, his creativity and courage in the recording of these dreams were his own act of resistance. She concealed her notes in the spines of books, replacing the word “party” with “family”, “arrest” with “flu” and doubling Hitler, Goebbels and Goring “Uncle Hans, Uncle Gustav and Uncle Gerhard”.
If dreams were the last private space available to humans, even in the most tyrannical dictatorships, is it always true when algorithms and social media flows were introduced into all aspects of our life? In the sixth book by Laila Lalami, The Dream HotelIA companies have returned to sleep, watching dreams through Dreamsaver, an implant of skulls that offers restful nights, but also reports disturbing dreams to the government.
“Dreams are really our last islands of freedom,” said Lalami in a recent interview. “The amount of data that the Big Five (technological companies) collect have become more extensive and more granular, threatening our freedoms, our mental health and even our free will.” The Dream Hotel Follows the protagonist, Sara, in the detention centers, the crimes of thought and the terrifying consequences of being taken on the wrong side of an algorithm, while Lalami makes an eloquent case to live without surveillance, to wake up or sleep: “She wants to be free, and what is freedom if not the fight of the gaze of others, including his?”
Perhaps these two books reflect the anxieties of this uncertain age. At a time when many are tempted to interpret dreams, holding a scriptwriter in the unconscious in search of Jungian comfort, the two authors bring a real idea of what dreams say – or do not do it. But you need a poet to shed light on what dreams can take us. Matthew Zapruder I love to hear your dreams: poems (2024) is for all sleeprs who are “already awake / at this strange hour / It does not end, / the twisted and without number”.
In the collection, Zapruder, which teaches creative writing to Saint Mary's College of California, counter-the pop-psychic trend to “interpret” dreams: “poems your dreams / do not have a hiding place / day to be wise / they are done / to be forgotten / therefore something / can be known”. He writes, he said to an interviewer early in the morning, “when everything seems full of promises, anxiety, beauty, silence and danger”.
For Beradt, Dreams told truths that humans have hidden from their monitoring self; For Lalami, dreams can be precious, although fragile, sanctuaries. And for readers, the vast literature of dreams and the journey of Zapruder through these night landscapes are a reminder of spending time from solitude, to draw from our deepest instincts rather than being carried away by the precipitated clamor of the world.
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