The political life of dreams

Even asleep, we remain citizens

An animating paradox of psychoanalysis is that while dreams are (or can be, or should be?) the most uninhibited realm, the telling of dreams involves curiously stable forms that take few liberties. As C.G. Jung observed in « On the Nature of Dreams » (1945), dream narratives typically follow a rigid dramatic structure: 1) the exposition, which involves a statement of place and identification of the protagonists, 2) the development of the plot, 3) the culmination of the plot, and 4) the solution or result. As children, one of our earliest exercises in narrative-making, in fact, is our shaping (or constraining?) of the anarchy of a dream — or the cognitive bedlam of a nightmare — into the communicable frame of a story.

Narrating a dream is, as the scholar of dreams Sharon Sliwinski has written, « an undoubtedly strange kind of speech, one we are not exactly the authors of. There is a fundamental distinction between the dream-as-dreamt and the dream-as-text, that is, from the actual experience of dreaming and the presentation of this experience in language afterward. » No wonder writers and artists have found the telling of dreams a fruitful challenge, and no wonder we might want to read their dream journals. The Swedish theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, the French ethnographer Michel Leiris, the American musician Henry Rollins, and the writers Franz Kafka, William S. Burroughs, Graham Greene, Georges Perec, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jack Kerouac — all of them recorded their dreams. The Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno kept a particularly racy journal of his nocturnal phantasmagoria: visits to brothels, a parade of famous faces (Jean Cocteau, Peter Suhrkamp, Leon Trotsky, Kaiser Wilhelm, Gershom Scholem, Fritz Lang), beheadings and torture and concentration camps and crucifixion, a couple of dinosaurs. In 1967, Adorno dreamt that his mistress wouldn’t give him head (« mit dem Mund lieben ») until he bought a « Schwanz-Waschmaschine » (a prick-washing machine). The story of that one ended with a return to real life: « Woke up laughing. »¹ As wild as the content of Adorno’s dreams was, they always had a beginning, middle, and end.

Do dreams have a politics? Sliwinski’s Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought (2017) offered several answers to this question. Each chapter is dedicated to specific time-space coordinates that intensified the political dimensions of dreamlife: « a notorious prison from apartheid-era South Africa », « the tangle of sexual relations in fin de siècle Vienna », « an Allied military hospital during the Great War », « one of the longest city sieges in history, the London Blitz », « the psychiatric wards of colonial Algeria », and « Berlin under the Third Reich ». In Sliwinski’s interpretation, dreams and their tellings — or at least some dreams — can be sources of political empowerment: « speaking of one’s oneiric life can serve as a particularly potent strategy for negotiating and resisting certain forms of sovereign power — a means to unsettle the power-knowledge relations of a given era ».