If you were judged on the basis of your darkest dreams, what could you be found guilty of? Moral debasement? Murderous intent? Desperate, cringey behavior? Thankfully, no one can spy on the sordid or embarrassing acts that may transpire in other people’s sleep. But two recently published books connect dream behavior to real-world implications. The reissued Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt, documents the dreams of Germans during Hitler’s rise in the 1930s; Laila Lalami’s novel, The Dream Hotel, imagines a woman who is incarcerated in part because of her nightmares. Together, these two very different works propose an intriguing argument: Dreams, though beyond our conscious control, might be our purest expressions of free will.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
Beradt’s dream catalogue, first published in 1966, shows how deeply the Nazis infiltrated the minds of ordinary Berliners: The city’s residents regularly reported being forced to sing songs or perform salutes in their sleep. In a recent essay about the book, my colleague Gal Beckerman was most interested in dreams of submission—scenarios in which Germans fiercely opposed to the Nazis might get a back massage from Hitler, or find him irresistibly charming at a party. Although Beradt interpreted these vignettes as reflections of “a deep wish to conform,” Beckerman, borrowing a little from Freud, suggests that such dreamers “might in fact be flirting with unfreedom subconsciously as a way of relieving this particular itch and fortifying themselves.”
In The Dream Hotel, Lalami conjures a future in which a dystopian surveillance state monitors people’s dreams, sometimes using the data to incarcerate those whom it deems likely to commit crimes. This week, Lalami wrote for The Atlantic about how plausible her speculative scenario feels today in America, with eerie parallels in news reports of permanent U.S. residents being detained for long-ago infractions. Yet Lailami embarked on the novel well before Donald Trump even ran for president. “I was thinking instead,” she writes, “about the ever-more-invasive forms of data collection that Big Tech had unleashed. I wondered if one of their devices might target the subconscious one day.”
Sara Hussein, the protagonist of The Dream Hotel, has dreams in which she poisons her husband or inadvertently pushes him off a bridge. Detained for “pre-crime,” she joins a cellblock of women incarcerated for similar reasons, people who are deemed dangerous by algorithms. The system of the novel is unfair in many ways, but its incursions into the unconscious feel most outrageous. Dreams are where private, unregulated impulses get to fight it out, freed from the imperatives of waking life and unhindered by the laws of society or reality. They are a medium through which humans can explore desires that are detrimental to themselves or others. If we were to act on every impulse or fear manifested there, chaos and anarchy would result. People would regularly show up to work in their underwear, betray or kill their lovers, miss most of their flights.
The idea that dreams predict our behavior is plainly absurd—but so is the notion that they therefore do not deserve our attention. As Beckerman writes, they can help us register slow, subtle changes in life, such as a growing yearning for freedom, or the creeping emotional stress caused by what he calls “nascent authoritarianism.” That’s part of why the premise of The Dream Hotel is so frightening: If anyone were able to see and control our dreams, they’d thereby command our imaginations.
