At the peak of the pandemic, when lockdowns and social distancing rules were imposed around the world, people suddenly reported stranger, more vivid dreams. It was the first time I had seen such widespread coverage of dreams in the media since I started my own self-guided studies on the topic more than ten years ago. Not only that, thousands of users shared their nocturnal visions on Twitter with the hashtag #coronadreams. Projects, such as Neptune’s COVID-19 Collective Dream Journal and I dream of covid, began emerging in an attempt to document how this societal shift was influencing our dreaming minds—individually and collectively. Observing these events at the time, I was reminded of "Das Dritte Reich des Traums" ("The Third Reich of Dreams"), a book by Charlotte Beradt that I had read about in late 2019, shortly before cases of the coronavirus were reported and ONEIRIC.SPACE's 'Anxiety Release Reading' took place.

After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Beradt, a Jewish journalist living in Berlin, kept having nightmares about being hunted. One night, she woke up in sweats, once again, but this time, with the thought that she might not be the only one having these types of dreams. This prompted her to record the dreams of people around her: A factory owner, an aunt, a dressmaker, a lawyer, a student. After fleeing Germany in 1939, Beradt and her husband found their way to New York in 1940. By then, she had a collection of three hundred dreams, fifty of which became her book "Das Dritte Reich des Traums," first published in 1966 in Germany with the help of political philosopher Hannah Arendt. The book, which is organized into chapters that focus on recurring themes, reveals how socio-political shifts have far-reaching effects on our psyche and, as Sliwinski writes about Beradt in one chapter, “represents one of the more systematic attempts to study this dynamic”. 

Beyond the psychoanalyst's office, there are few spaces in modern life designated for freely discussing dreams, especially as they relate to our broader social context. Oftentimes, this intimate part of our lives is deemed too trivial to be worth our sustained attention. In "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" (2013), the American art critic Jonathan Crary points out that the value of dreams began to wane in the seventeenth century because dreaming couldn't be "accommodated within conceptions of mental life based on empirical sense perception or on abstract rational thought." And its devaluation continued after Sigmund Freud published "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900. “The widely held truism that all dreaming is the scrambled, disguised expression of a repressed wish is a colossal reduction of the multiplicity of dream experiences,” Crary writes.