Dreaming in the Age of Extremes. For a Historical Reading of Transcripts of Dreams

This article uses transcripts of dreams as a prism through which to study the life experiences of individuals in the Age of Extremes. The article challenges a one-sided psychoanalytical interpretation that regards the manifest dream content only as a concealment of the subconscious (sexual or aggressive) wishes of the dreamer. On the other hand, the article also debunks a purely “political” reading of dream narratives that would treat all reminiscences of a dreamer’s personal life story as irrelevant. In fact, the Freudian categories of compression, displacement and suppression may work in both directions : from the personal to the political, and backwards, from the political to the personal. Thus, a patricide committed in a dream may well conceal the wish to kidnap a disliked politician – or vice versa. It is also argued that dreaming in the Age of Extremes, and the activity of transcribing dreams, were potentially subversive acts by which the limits of what may have been said openly were often put to the test. A couple of examples are used to elaborate on these points. The examples are taken from dream protocols written around 1980 by German author Heinar Kipphardt, from a collection of dreams about the Third Reich made by Charlotte Beradt in the 1930s and published in the 1960s, and from a dream diary written by a middle-aged English woman in the autumn of 1939 and kept in the Mass-Observation Archive.