Dreams of Our Future
It is time for a little dream analysis—at a cultural level. Our collective dreams might reveal something about where we are headed.
Hannah Arendt, who narrowly escaped from Nazi German, believed that a democratic society needed an open, pluralistic public space and a protected private space. If we do not have the public forum, we cannot engage in democratic dialogue. If we do not have the private space, we will not develop the kind of individuals who are willing to express democratic values and ethics in the public forum.
We need both, and we cannot have one without the other. At the same time, the boundary between these two spaces needs to be permeable.
The boundary is engaged by acts. One of the most important acts is storytelling—at least, a certain kind of storytelling that both penetrates the boundary and maintains it.
With genres like the personal essay and memoir, writers can reveal their private world and participate in the public forum. They can build, as I argued in The Ethics of Nonfiction, a democratic self.
They can also say, “No.” By this, I mean that they can decide that they will not share some aspects of their personal life. With the “no,” placed within a story that reveals the author’s connection to time and place, the author’s adoption of key democratic values, the author’s struggles to be authentic in a world of performance and spectacle, the author simultaneously moves through the boundary and closes it. This is what I mean by an act that “engages” the boundary.
The dream narrative is another genre that engages the boundary. Some might be surprised that I call dreams a genre. The experience of dreaming is, perhaps, not a genre, but the telling of dreams is. As dreams are shaped into a genre, they often reveal what I—an individual—am experiencing in my daily life from the perspective of my unconscious, the part of my mind that is beyond my control, beyond my conscious denial of what unfolds before me. But, once I begin to recount what I remember of my dream experience, I am shaping the story. I am trying to make conscious sense of it.
The experience of the dream might be emotional and primal. The telling of the dream helps me to understand what I am ignoring about the reality of my quotidian life.
In Germany, from 1933 to 1939, Charlotte Beradt transcribed the dreams of her neighbors and friends. She used a code in case her transcripts were discovered (Hitler became “Uncle Hans”) and then mailed the texts, as if they were letters, to friends outside of Germany. In 1939, she and her husband fled Germany, eventually emigrating to New York, where she spent time with other German immigrants, including Hannah Arendt. In 1966, she published The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmare of a Nation. In 2025, it was translated by Damion Searls and published by Princeton University Press. The timing is not an accident.
Beradt begins chapter one with the following epigram, attributed to Robert Ley, Nazi Head of the German Labor Front: “The only private individuals left in Germany are people sleeping.” She begins chapter two with a quote from her friend Hannah Arendt: “Total domination becomes truly total the moment it closes the iron hand of terror on its subjects’ private social lives, and it never fails to boast of this achievement.”
When our unacknowledged fears about the future begin to enter our dreams, our private world is starting to erode. When we can no longer speak of even our dreams, the public forum begins to lose independent voices. It ceases to be pluralistic.
Beradt’s book looked back in history with the first German edition, and now, with the current edition, it connects Germany of the 1930s and America of 2025. She presents seventy-five of her dream transcripts (she collected about three hundred) with her commentary. The dreams read like prose poems. Beradt’s commentary is brilliant and sobering—actually, horrifying.
I have been having similar dreams. Maybe, you have also. Most of my dreams are about a coming civil war.
I am going to quote from only one of Beradt’s transcripts. The person (the author or storyteller?) of the following dream was a factory owner who was, importantly, a member of the National Socialist Party. He had the dream repeatedly, and, as he recounted it to Beradt, he broke into a cold sweat:
Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the two rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation or displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised. The only way I was physically able to keep standing there was by fixing my eyes on his clubfoot as he limped out. I stood like that until I woke up.
Remember, this man was a member of the National Socialist Party—a public supporter of the Nazis. Yet, even he did not feel safe. Even he was humiliated. Even he was not good enough.
As I will keep repeating in this forum, we need to understand the Big Lie of totalitarianism: The big leader promises that he will only go after our enemies. He promises to protect us.
That is the lie. What we need to understand is that, when one of us is unsafe, we are all unsafe. When one of us loses our rights, we all lose our rights. In the end, the big leader will come after us.
Without safety, one of the most basic of needs, we lose ourselves. In her commentary on this dream, Beradt writes that this man experiences “alienation from the environment and alienation from oneself.” She says, “He has not even become unheroic, much less an antihero—he has become a non-person.” How can this breathing non-person, non-individual, alive but not living, resist anything, much less the terror of a totalitarian state?
Once Hitler and Goebbels entered the dreams of the average German, the German state was well on its way to creating the perfect subject of the Third Reich, the subject who follows orders and serves as a silent witness.
Here is one of the most interesting aspects of dreams. They are not arguments, at least, not formal arguments. They cannot be refuted. I cannot say, “You didn’t dream that.” Or, “Your dream is a lie.” Or, “Your dream is illogical.” Yet, they send a vivid and often haunting message, not only about our unconscious fears, but also about the reality that is breaking our normal lives.
In her book, Beradt interprets dreams collected from 1933 to 1939 with the knowledge of the history that followed. She wrote her interpretations in the mid-1960s, after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed in first person narratives and Nazi documents, in the work of her friend Hannah Arendt. She is able to show that the dreams were prophetic. Not as in a message from the gods. But as in the power of the unconscious to sense the path of history, even as the conscious mind struggles to hold onto the normal.
We need to write our dreams down. We need to shape them into a story. We need to share our dreams with others. This is one way that we can begin to understand what we are living through in this moment. This is one way that we warn others about an emerging future, a possible future, a future not yet fixed.
If we share our dream, we might find that, in dark times, our private dreams are actually about collective fears. In the stories of our dreams, we might find community. We might even find solidarity.