In your dreams

One book I think about a lot is Charlotte Beradt's long out-of-print Third Reich of Dreams, which pores over hundreds of dreams she collected during the years 1933-1939 in Germany, mapping the psyche under totalitarianism, and setting out to disprove from the first page its epigraph, an NS-Reichsorganisationsleiter’s musings that "the only person in Germany who still leads a private life is the person who sleeps."

Not so fast.

There's the doctor who dreams that he's settling down with a book in his apartment one evening when an announcement comes over the loudspeakers proclaiming the abolition of walls, and all at once the walls disappear: he's totally exposed. What private life?

And then the housewife who dreams that her Dutch oven repeats "in a harsh and penetrating voice" every joke the family has ever told to the Stormtrooper who shows up at their door. And in fact many people report dreams about everyday household objects that suddenly testify against them and go on and on, revealing everything.

Beradt writes: "Here we see a person in the process of being fashioned by a very elusive and even today not fully understood form of terrorization, a terrorization that consisted... of sheer uncertainty about how complete this surveillance was..."

"Although our housewife did not actually believe there were built-in microphones... that very night dreamt that ‘simply everything we have ever thought or said among ourselves is known.’ What dream could better suit the purposes of a totalitarian regime?"

Another dreamer: "I dreamt that I seated myself ceremoniously at my desk, having finally decided to submit a formal complaint... I put a perfectly blank piece of paper in an envelope, proud to have made my complaint but at the same time feeling deeply ashamed of myself… Another time I dreamt I was calling the police department to lodge a complaint — and found I could not say a word."

Beradt observes: "When a person finally does decide to act, only to find he has exhausted his strength in deciding...what a telling picture this gives us of the general reluctance to speak out and of how man's will atrophied under constant compromising."

Finally, there was the woman who invented in her dreams a thought-control machine: "Yes, it was electric, a maze of wires." To Beradt, "the machine symbolizes the ever-present dangers caused by outside control exercised over man's thoughts and actions, automatism in the sequence of events."

Some years ago, our own climate of constriction and surveillance started to insinuate itself in my dreams. I dream often that I'm speaking and no one can hear a word I say. Or that I'm speaking and the people listening can hear only words I never said. I have dreams where everyone is accompanied everywhere by a little scroll of paper and a feather quill that scribbles down every single thought that crosses their minds, available for consultation by anyone else at any time.

Are you having bad dreams, too?