What do Europeans dream about?

I was in the garden to fix our robotic lawn mower (…) Suddenly a large creature appeared. It was covered with grey fur and walked on two legs. On its head were two horns. They stood up straight. His voice had nothing human about it. But no feeling of threat came from it. He said to me: « Now I will show you what it’s like to live without god. » Then the creature left immediately, nothing further happened, and I continued with my work.

This is one of the many dreams that are retold in Hamburg-born author Wolfram Lotz’s compact book Träume in Europa (Dreams in Europe). « All dreams are edited posts from European dream forums, » is the only explanation prefacing it. The book is made up entirely of dreams dreamt somewhere in Europe, one after another, separated only by an empty line. No annotations about the people dreaming them — they are generally ageless, genderless dreamers of any nationality. No explanation. The whole theme of this curious book, that in a way contains a sliver of a European unconscious, could very well lie in that dreamer’s response after meeting a horned creature: « Nothing further happened, and I continued with my work. » 

The dreams Lotz includes in Träume in Europa range from a few sentences to a few pages and are told in the first person, all in German. The last page of the book contains a list of links to 27 internet forums in many languages — German, Italian, Bulgarian or Russian. People post on these sites in order to get help interpreting their dreams. 

There are recurring themes: vanished parents, confrontations at work, relationships changing, celebrities or dead relatives suddenly showing up, threats that are made and dissolved without consequence. Strange scenes end abruptly. 

In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Lotz mentions Charlotte Beradt’s Das Dritte Reich des Traums (The Third Reich of Dreams, 1966). Beradt recorded and contextualized the dreams of people around her, living under Hitler in 1930s Germany. Lotz couldn’t get into the book, he found it too dogmatic. He says that instead, he wanted to access the idea of Europe through a sort of collective unconscious, and thereby uncover

So, what is this narrative? It emerges faintly from between the different dreamscapes. Lotz counts on the readers’ ability and willingness to interpret dreams, to understand them both as text and as symbols, to let a feeling of the continent arise. This lack of a strong thesis is enjoyable, even while it also leaves the reader wondering about the significance of these dreams.

Several dreams that Lotz notes set up a suspenseful adventure but then peter out. In one, someone handing out customer surveys falls from a roof into a dark warehouse. There is a « grim » man there who gives the wrong order number. « Can you please just tell me the truth? » the dreamer asks him. But the man remains silent. Later, he seems to leave. The dreamer explores the room further, finds a shelf full of products, but can’t tell what it is exactly, because it’s all in boxes. That’s where the dream ends. A gloomy atmosphere, but ultimately, nothing happens.

For Lotz, this is something that reflects the continent. In his interview with publisher S. Fischer, he says that these anti-climactic endings reflect the reality of everyday life in Europe, where the « potential for adventure » — for extreme highs and lows — is remote. « When, for example, you get sick in Europe and go to the doctor, you usually get better again. These are narrative structures that actually occur in our lifeworld (Erfahrungswelt). » 

He had already suspected Europe was currently « the most dreamless continent in the world », and he saw that idea reflected in the un-dreamlike practicality of the dreams he found on internet forums. They had a « strange objectivity, only containing remnants of fantasy and transcendence — and as such, the future. » Lotz reveals a continent without ideas about its future. 

There are nonetheless a number of disturbingly violent dreams in the book. In one, a person is lying in bed with a stranger, when someone comes in and attacks the stranger with a screwdriver. The dreamer watches on. In another, someone brings a rescued monkey home but becomes disgusted by the animal and starts torturing it. In another, a dreamer beats a colleague to death with a stick after a dispute.

Usually, the drama is smaller — the dreams more benign. They are told in a gentle sort of straightforward language, and the dreamer often explicitly states: I didn’t feel threatened, I wasn’t afraid. They flow from one place, one perspective, gender and tone to the next. Thanks to Lotz’ editing, it’s a much more interesting read than you’d imagine a book full of strangers’ dreams to be. 

A few opening lines:

« I was in a shopping center with my partner. » 

« I had purple hair, which looked pretty stupid, and was an employee in a drugstore. » 

« I was on my way home from work and drove on the motorway, which was otherwise completely empty. »

« I got everything ready for a little party. » 

« I’m in the United States and am witnessing the destruction of an American city by the detonation of an atom bomb. » 

There are several uncomfortable dreams about family members and sex, locations varying from gas stations to noble houses. One woman is hugged by someone she knows from the internet, who makes her feel safer than her husband does. Another dreamer overlooks the Alps during a flight from Spain and wonders why they are alive. Someone dreams of a pile of dirt crawling towards them, asking for a hug — as if, the dreamer notes, they don’t already have enough to do with their kids.

The Russian invasion in Ukraine seems to feature — perhaps from dreams extracted from a Russian forum. One Russian dreamer thinks they are on the way to the UK, but their flight terminates in Istanbul. They return to their hometown on the river Oka, to find all the houses have burnt down. 

The pandemic, however — which is when Lotz discovered the forums — does not feature at all, at least not explicitly.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that Träume in Europa is not a « grand work », but a pleasurable in-between-book of peculiar poetics, while the Süddeutsche Zeitung decreed it was probably the most ingenious and the funniest book available in German this spring. 

Wolfram Lotz (1981) is an author and playwright whose unconventional works have been performed in major theaters throughout German speaking cities. Der große Marsch (The Great March, 2011) features appearances by Hamlet, the Russian Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Lotz himself. Die lächerliche Finsternis (The Ridiculous Darkness, 2014) is a continuation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, examining how Africa is viewed from the West, while calling theater itself into question. Often, he involves the audience in his plays: at the premiere of Der große Marsch the audience was invited on stage to take part in a buffet, after which they weren’t allowed to leave — the actors continued the play in the auditorium. 

Lotz has described his varying degrees of meddling with the dreams he recounted in his book. Sometimes he only used one sentence from a forum post, sometimes a passage, sometimes the whole dream, sometimes he wrote in the same vibe but added different details, sometimes he spliced together different dreams. He felt so strongly that this was a case of shared authorship, that his name does not appear on the cover. But for a reader, the author is constantly present. Knowing that he meddled with the dreams, that he wrote some himself, that he rearranged others, one wonders what it is that Lotz wants to tell us with those changes.

To Lotz, the form of the conventional novel, in which a subject travels through the world, « is no longer true. If anything, today it is the world that travels through the subject, » as he explained on his publisher’s website. The internet, as a form, is closer to our reality. His texts are therefore composed more like lists, containing different things that don’t stand in relation but should be read together. In 2022, he published Heilige Schrift I (Holy Scripture I) — a nine-hundred-page collection of thoughts, observations and experiences of a stay-at-home dad living in a small French town in Alsace. While Träume in Europa is a very different piece of writing, he wants all his works to be read together. 

When I visit the URLs mentioned in the back of the book, the first post I find on a German dream forum from October 2025 is titled « Two tame lions and a lively baby ». A man takes a baby swimming and is watched by lions. He’s scared, worries the lions want to eat the baby. But they sit calmly, seem peaceful. Still, he thinks about taking the baby out of the water discreetly. Then he wakes up. 

The language is so similar to the dreams in Lotz’ book. Soft, descriptive, careful, exact, questioning.

According to a recent survey among Europeans, the feeling of being a citizen of the European Union has been on the decline since 2022. In the European unconscious Lotz conjures up, Europe as a political entity doesn’t feature, and rarely are locations or languages mentioned. You get the sense that these dreams could take place anywhere — but perhaps not anywhere else but Europe.

By curating and creatively editing this collection of dreams, Lotz has crafted a short book and a creative thesis. He has chosen to focus on the uncontrolled thoughts of strangers; on the ones these strangers shared with other strangers, to ask for interpretation and meaning. He did so because he wanted to explore the continent in writing, and what he found, according to him, was a continent in stasis — a bit boring maybe, but it does seem its residents feel safe. Lions don’t eat the baby, horned creatures immediately leave your garden, life goes on without god.