Charlotte Beradt collected the dreams of ordinary Germans under the Third Reich. In them, factory owners made involuntary Nazi salutes. Women dreamed erotically of Hitler. Sleep was where totalitarianism completed its work. This last private space invaded.
Fernando Pessoa saw something opposite. And now I’m sleepy, because I think that the meaning of it all is to sleep. For Pessoa in Text 39, waking consciousness distorts. Sleep is where the self stops performing and something truer emerges.
Among the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, the dream self was the authoritative self. What you did asleep carried real moral weight. Dreams guided daily decisions. If you wronged someone in a dream, you owed restitution on waking.