6 - Nazi Terror and the Poetical Potential of Dreams: Charlotte Beradt's Das Dritte Reich des Traums

Summary

Dreams Dictated by Dictatorship

Ich träumte, daß ich nur noch von Rechtecken, Dreiecken, Achtekken träume, die alle irgendwie wie Weihnachtsgebäck aussehen, weil es doch verboten ist zu träumen.

[I dreamt I was dreaming of nothing but rectangles, triangles, and octagons, all of which somehow looked like Christmas cookies — you see, it was forbidden to dream.]

This simple but intricate meta-dream, about dreaming in defiance of a prohibition against dreams, was dreamt by an anonymous young man in Germany in the summer of 1933. Its starting point is, as it seems, the fear that dreams might be forbidden. It is hardly surprising that such an idea should emerge in a document coinciding historically with the establishment of a totalitarian regime. However, the man's dream expresses both the fear that dreams may be forbidden and the knowledge that dreams cannot be forbidden, that it is impossible to stop them. The compromise offered here is a form of dreaming implementing a self-censorship that reduces the dream content to abstract geometrical shapes, thus erasing and blocking all mimetic qualities normally characteristic of the dream process. Ironically, even such a precaution does not prevent the occurrence of an element of desire. The resemblance of the geometrical forms with Christmas cookies indicates that the dreamer is occupied with pleasures to be found in the empirical world.

More important than such details is the general significance of this remarkable dream. It draws the reader's attention to the critical potential of dreaming.