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. In Text 39, Pessoa, sleep is where something genuine emerges.
Among the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, the dream self was the authoritative self.Dreams guided daily decisions and carried real moral weight. If you wronged someone in a dream, you owed restitution on waking.
pulled Pessoa off the shelf immediately. Blanchot, too, who writes:
“We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire’s repetitiousness. There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake. […] The dream is without end, waking is without beginning; neither one nor the other ever reaches itself.”
A rather wonderful addition. Thank you, Bianca.