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 a counter-narrative to the idea of Europe that is prevalent in Brussels or in the news.