Charlotte Beradt’s new haunting biography The Third Reich of Dreams is an important event for psychologists, cultural historians, and anyone interested in dreams. Among its many merits, this book stands as a milestone in contemporary dream research Freud‘s Interpretation of dreams and two papers by Aserinsky and Kleitman from the early 1950s make a WishIts relationship with REM sleep was known. This has been a central part of my thinking about dreams for nearly 40 years, going back to graduate school when I wrote a class paper on Beradt’s work, as seen in psychoanalytical DW Winnicott’s objectivity, especially his ideas about play and transitional phenomena. Below is a brief overview of several ways The Third Reich of Dreams affects and even predicts the study of dreams.
Dreaming as a mirror of culture
The first major insight of this text is that dreams can be a meaningful reflection of social, cultural and political phenomena. The Third Reich of Dreams provides clear evidence that dreams are important not only in relation to our personal lives but also in relation to the collective concerns of other people in society. Although it may sound strange to modern ears, this has been a common belief about people’s dreams in religious and cultural traditions throughout history throughout the world. The Third Reich of Dreams it reminds us of the powerful ability to dream, which seems to have been forgotten in modern times.
Beradt’s text also reminds us how fragile sleep itself is. Some of the most poignant passages in the book involve people whose external political oppression reaches the point where it disrupts and injures their ability to dream, making them strangers to themselves. The Third Reich of Dreams shows that sleep not only reflects but also influences collective dynamics by this dynamic, sometimes terrifying and destructive.
At the same time, Beradt presents several dreams that depict with remarkable accuracy the emergence of new technologies for internal surveillance and individual persecution. When I read it for the first time The Third Reich of Dreams in the 1980s it was hard for me to imagine the vague prospect of lights and stoves and other household items that could listen in on your private conversations, secretly record them, and send them to hostile authorities to use against you. What a terrifying world that would be! And then… we opened our front doors and welcomed these devices into our homes. The nightmares of the Germans in the 1930s became popular consumer products today. The Third Reich of Dreams indicates that this may not end well.
The cultural value of big dreams
Beginning on page 18 of the new translation, Beradt describes her prolific protagonist, a young woman with unusual, vivid, and politically sensitive dreams. Although Beradt does not speak favorably of her character, he acknowledges that the young woman’s visionary dreams mark her as Heraclitus’ “equal Sibyl”… the characters of his dream and their actions, their details and nuances, were objectively correct. (19) This woman we now know is what we call after Carl Jung, a great dreamer, a person who probably since childhoodexperienced more intense, strange, and extensive dreams than most other people. The Third Reich of Dreams shows the valuable insights that can be gained through special payments attention to the dreams of big dreamers, especially in the period of collective crisis and uncertainty about the future.
“The Great Resistance”
To close on a literary note, I recommend readers to read from The Third Reich of Dreams at the end of Shakespeare’s play, they occupy the same position as Theseus and Hippolyta A summer night’s sleepwhen they hear four Athenian youths returning from the forest and tell each other about their oneiric experience. In the first line of Act V, Hippolyta comments, “It is wonderful, my Theseus, that these lovers talk of.” Theseus replies skeptically, “More strange than the truth,” and he continues for the next 20 lines to slander. a lot the seductive behavior of “a madman, a lover and a poet”. His speech is often taken out of context as Shakespeare’s story about the supremacy of the “cold mind”. But taken in context, as a response to Hippolyta’s comment about the unusual and continuous dreams of several people, Theseus demurs at the very point he finds most surprising. A dreamer’s vision can be dismissed as such fantasy of a madman consumed by a “boiling brain” (Vi4), but what are we to make of the shared experiences of a group of dreamers? This A vital point, says Hippolyta, and marvels at the implications:
But the whole story of the night was told,
And all their minds changed together,
Witness more than pin pictures,
And grows into a great permanent thing,
But still amazing and admirable. (Vi23-27)
At the same time, Charlotte Beradt’s text asks us to put aside the rationalist. bias that dreams are “weirder than reality”, just random fragments nerve nonsense generated by isolated brains instead of looking closely at the recurring patterns in many people’s dreams to understand the conflicts and concerns of their wider society. Although born in the most difficult circumstances, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a powerful testimony to what I believe is the truly hopeful ability of everyone’s dreams. Whether theses of the world – Theseii of the world? – say, we shouldn’t let them stop us from realizing the “big deal” in the wonderful and surprising shared experience of dreaming.
