“Throughout all time, people have experienced terrifying dreams, dreams not only touched off by some external crisis of a personal nature or originating in the inner tensions of singularly sensitive persons, but brought about by situations that threaten people collectively.” - Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams

Ten days into the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, I had a pretty vague dream, typically vague, in that I couldn’t really remember any of the details. Except I realized that the characters in my dream had been social distancing: meeting but not shaking hands, standing far apart from each other. Wow, I thought. That was quick. It hadn’t taken long at all for the changes in day-to-day life to fall into the churn of the unconscious.

Charlotte Beradt in The Third Reich of Dreams tracked the effect that authoritarianism and terror in Nazi Germany had on the nation’s dreamers. She found that the dreams of those under oppression were notably changed. Some of them even had the same kinds of dreams as each other, what could be called new archetypal dreams. A shared sort of processing of a collective trauma.

I would hazard to say that most of us in the U.S. (though not all of us) are not navigating the same level of trauma under covid-19 as those living under the Third Reich. We are fortunate in this way.

Still, these are highly unusual times. I was curious to know how the anxieties of the moment would translate to our dreams.