Dreaming of danger

[Plus audio version]

Have you ever dreamed that your work colleagues had turned into literal zombies, or that you had returned to an old job only to be some kind of ghost who was never paid at the end of the month, or that you were being carried out of the building in which you work in a state of speechless paralysis?

These were some of the nightmares described to Belgian film-maker Sophie Bruneau in her 2018 documentary Rêver sous le capitalisme (‘Dreaming under capitalism’), [1] which I saw at a local film festival a few months back.

When you spend most of your waking hours at work, it is inevitably something that sinks deep into your unconscious, for better or for worse – and you can end up spending most of your sleeping hours at work as well!

The film shows how, under the rapacious plutocracy that owns our world, the increasing pressure for greater productivity and fewer staff, the stripping-away of little perks and privileges and the general dehumanisation of the workplace can have a terrible impact on our minds.

But the ill effects must be vastly multiplied by the fact that we are also living in societies heading towards totalitarianism, where people’s homes are raided at dawn for expressing opinions the state does not like and they are treated as “terrorists” for taking a stance against genocide.

When she spoke about her film after the screening, Bruneau explained that the idea came from a book first published 60 years ago – Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams: the Nightmares of a Nation (Das Dritte Reich des Traums).

Here Beradt (pictured) presents and comments on numerous dreams she personally gathered from other people living in Germany under Nazism in the 1930s.

She insists that the dreams she cites are not the result of conflicts in the dreamers’ personal lives, but “the conflict caused by a public realm full of stress and agitation”. [2]

Any similarities between the Nazi regime in Germany and the increasingly authoritarian globalist regime we know today are not in the least bit coincidental, as I keep pointing out – behind both we find one and the same vast organised crime and terror network that I call ZIM. [3]

When I got hold of a 2025 English translation of Beradt’s book, I was interested to see that this new edition very much reflects the feeling, shared by so many of us, that our society is heading into a dictatorship like that of Nazi Germany (or indeed communist Russia, another ZIM construct [4]).

The front cover features a quote from author Zadie Smith declaring: “This is the kind of book that haunts your dreams. Essential reading for anyone who has known what it is like to live within a totalitarian state – or is worried they’re about to find out”.

And the Nazi concept of Gleichschaltung sounds very much like the propaganda-fuelled assaults on free speech that we have endured in recent years over issues such as Covid “disinformation”, “transphobia” and “anti-semitism”, even though on the last point the Nazis’ public programme was obviously the mirror opposite.

Beradt explains: “Literally ‘synchronizing’ in the sense of ‘coordinating by force’ or ‘imposing mandatory conformity’, this was the Nazi term for the imposition of total political and social control – turning labor unions into Nazi organizations, putting pressure on civic associations, universities and other institutions to expel Jewish members, and so on”. [5]

I suppose that, in 2020s jargon, Gleichschaltung would be something like “boosting inclusivity and countering hate”.

Dunya Mikhail makes the link between the two periods in her thoughtful foreword. She writes: “In an era where personal freedoms are increasingly under threat, Beradt’s meticulous documentation of dreams under the Nazi regime stands as a testament to the importance of preserving the sanctity of our human dignity against oppressive political systems”. [6]

And she stresses how dreams can help communicate more deeply the psychological effects of a totalitarian society: “In poetry, metaphors can open up layers of meaning and resonance that enrich the readers’ experiences, making them reflect and feel rather than just understand.

“In these dreams, the same principles apply, though perhaps more raw and unfiltered… these dreams encapsulate raw emotions and realities, presented not through deliberate poetic devices, but through the spontaneous production of the sleeping psyche”. [7]

A lack of personal privacy in the face of an ever-intruding state machine featured frequently in the material collected by Beradt.

One 45-year old doctor had this dream in 1934, a year into the Third Reich: “At around nine o’clock, after my workday was done and I was about to relax on the sofa with a book on Matthias Grünewald, the walls of my room, of my whole apartment, suddenly disappeared. I looked around in horror and saw that none of the apartments as far as the eye could see had any walls left. I heard a loudspeaker blare: ‘Per Wall Abolition Decree dated the 17th of this month’”. [8]

It is telling enough that, even in that low-tech era, a greengrocer felt the need, in real life, to place a cushion over the telephone when his family was sitting and chatting together in the evenings. In his dream, Beradt tells us, this pillow “suddenly grew a tongue and started testifying against him”. [9]

A girl relates: “I dreamed that I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that the two angels hung above my head were no longer looking up – they were looking down, keeping a sharp eye on me. I was so scared that I crawled under my bed”. [10]

And a female hatmaker had the following experience in the summer of 1933: “I dreamed that I was talking in my dream and to be safe was speaking Russian. (I don’t speak any Russian, and also I never talk in my sleep). I was speaking Russian so that I wouldn’t understand myself and no one would understand me either, in case I said anything about the government, because that’s against the law and would have to be reported”. [11]

As we can see from her comment about not wanting to understand herself, the oppression of the Nazi state was such that people unconsciously felt that it was not safe to think in an unauthorised manner.

One woman recounts: “I was sitting in a box at the opera, beautifully dressed, my hair done, wearing a new dress. The opera house was huge, with many, many, tiers, and I was enjoying many admiring glances.

“They were performing my favourite opera, The Magic Flute. After the line ‘That is the devil, certainly’, a squad of policemen marched in and headed straight toward me, their footsteps ringing out loud and clear. They had discovered by using some kind of machine that I had thought about Hitler when I heard the word ‘devil’”. [12]

In the workings of minds traumatised by totalitarianism; dreaming itself became a source of possible danger. Beradt says: “I even ran across the dream ‘It’s forbidden to dream but I’m dreaming anyway’, a half dozen times in almost identical form”. [13]

There were echoes of the dehumanisation described in Bruneau’s film, with several dreamers describing being surrounded by mute and expressionless faces. [14]

I was reminded of the sickening general complicity with the Covid tyranny when reading about the dreams of Germans who, deep down, wanted to conform, yearned to love Big Brother for the sake of a quiet life.

One eye doctor dreamed in 1934: “The storm troopers were putting barbed wire into the hospital windows. I had sworn I would never allow them to bring their barbed wire into my ward.

“But then I did allow it after all; I stood there like a caricature of a doctor as they knocked out the glass and turned my hospital room into a concentration camp with barbed wire – and even so, I lost my job.

“But I was summoned back to treat Hitler, because I was the only one in the world who could; I was proud of myself for that, and felt so ashamed of my pride that I started crying”. [15]

A woman dreamed that she had been thrown out of a friend’s house for daring to insist that it did not matter if people failed to utter the expected greeting of “Heil Hitler!“

In a state of shock, she waited for a bus to take her home. “When the bus finally came, it was full, and as I got on I said to all the passengers, who were silently staring at me, ‘Heil Hitler!‘”. [16]

Beradt tells how another dreamer, in his 30s, pictures Hitler as a kind of circus clown and sees through his act – “and yet the act works; after a while he tells himself that it’s not half as bad as it seems, and there’s no point in ‘bothering to be opposed’.

“In other words, he depicts both how we accept external circumstances and the inner state that produces such acceptance: the willingness to let oneself be fooled; the tendency to come up with alibis once we’ve been conditioned by the right combination of pressure and propaganda for long enough and been made receptive and malleable enough that all our resistance crumbles”. [17]

“One man managed a dream that captures in a single sentence how undramatic and imperceptible such a transition from suggestion to autosuggestion can be: ‘I dreamed I said “I don’t have to always say No anymore”‘. This fairy-tale formulation ‘don’t have to anymore’ – almost touching amid all the totalitarian versions of ‘you do have to’ – shows yet again what a ‘struggle’ it is to be ‘opposed’. Freedom is a burden, unfreedom comes as a relief”. [18]

But, in the direst of consequences, there are always those who refuse to give in to tyranny, both physically and psychologically.

Beradt collected a dream from a woman aged about 30, who in 1934 was in a rebel group producing and distributing an illegal newspaper. [19] This woman wrote the dream down the night she had it, but disguised it as much as possible, since she knew it might be incriminating.

In fact, Beradt herself took the same precaution while initially compiling her book, replacing the word ‘Party’ with ‘family’, referring to Hitler, Goering and Goebbels as Uncle Hans, Uncle Gustav and Uncle Gerhard and writing ‘flu’ instead of ‘arrest’. [20]

In any case, the dissident dreamer related: “We ran through the giant rooms (like the Berlin Zoo’s pavilions) covered with pictures of Hitler and more pictures of Hitler, running in step without having planned to, as energetically as a person can possibly run. ‘We’ve opposed the party for a long time, we need to protest!’ Later, just: ‘We need to protest!’

“People started looking up at us – only a few at first, then more, many approving glances. No one ran with us. We ran down hallways through more big rooms with Hitler pictures everywhere, and as we ran we cried ‘We need to protest!’.

“With incredible focus and all our strength, since we knew that once we’d started we had to keep recruiting more people to run with us or else the game was up, we kept shouting and running, running in step, screaming ‘We need to protest!’ dozens of times, probably a hundred times.

“Then I woke up, totally exhausted, and felt compelled to repeat a few more times, in the same rhythm: ‘We need to protest!’ I had to repeat it a few more times during that day”. [21]

Beradt also includes in her book a dream that was experienced in prison by student resistance activist Sophie Scholl in 1943, the night before she was executed, and which she told to her cellmate.

“It was a sunny day and I was carrying a baby in a long white dress to be baptized. The road to the church ran up a steep mountain. But I held the child tight, safe in my arms. Then suddenly a crevasse opened up right in front of me. I had just enough time to put the child down on the other side, then I fell into the chasm”. [22]

Scholl (pictured) then explained to the cellmate what the dream meant: “The child is our idea, and it will prevail despite all obstacles. We can prepare the way for it, even though we will have to die for it before its victory”. [23]

Given the close parallels between the Nazi period and our own, I thought it would be interesting to extend Beradt’s (and Bruneau’s) project by applying it to today’s society – not just in terms of the workplace, but in the broader context of disappearing freedom and the shadow of terror on the horizon.

I therefore invite readers to send me their own 21st century dreams, together with a bit of context about who you are and when you had the dream. I don’t suppose there is a book in it, but hopefully I will at least be able to publish a follow-up article in due course.

To get the ball rolling, I will share a dream that I had in November 2015, a few days after the terror attacks up in Paris. I wrote it down immediately, recording the time as 1.30am, and I will repeat that account here word for word.

“I was on a boat, I think (maybe a bus/train?) and out of the window we could see dead bodies everywhere. In fact, I think the journey was starting for the second time – there had been a sort of abortive attempt along the same lines. Perhaps there was a question of flooding on the river?

“Anyway, I pointed out that the bodies had been mutilated, often beyond recognition. They were mostly without limbs, which had been chopped off, and sometimes [they were] just a smear of blood.

“I said to [a friend] that I was scared shitless, scared that the person/people who did this would do the same to us. He said I was being absurd – I got angry. There was some kind of argument/discussion about me being supposedly rebellious or not.

“Then suddenly a large man walked up the steps of what was now the upper deck of a bus (or a double-decker boat!). He had leather arm and shoulder pads and was powerfully built, like a soldier or riot cop.

“He grabbed hold of my arm and said: ‘1, 2, 3 – I’m in charge’. It was some kind of hypnotism or mind control/domination technique. I shouted ‘No, you’re not!’ several times, in a voice that wasn’t as loud as I would’ve liked.

“I think maybe at that point I ‘woke up’ into some kind of pseudo-reality, which wasn’t really being awake. I realised this was the only way to escape – to realise that it was just a dream and pull out of it.

“But soon I was back in it again. We (?) were in some place where there were more of these threatening people (plus another man who was less threatening, though not friendly – neutral).

“At some point somebody was saying they should send more police in, but I said that was the last thing that was needed. Instead, there should be a ‘posse’ of civilians, in numbers, to prevent the domination of these powerful/violent individuals. Not sure what happened next. I was still scared. I woke myself up for real and wrote this down.

“Immediate associations: the Paris massacres on Friday night and the First World War. Raw power. ‘Orso’. [a character representing raw power in the novel I was writing at the time]”.

I finished with a comment in French: “Je reconnais cette violence: c’est la violence du pouvoir. [I recognise this violence: it’s the violence of power]”.

If you would like to share a relevant dream with me and my other readers, please do get in touch via cudenec(at)riseup.net

[1] https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dreamingunder
[2] Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: the Nightmares of a Nation (Das Dritte Reich des Traums, 1966), trans. by Damion Searls (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025), p. 10. All subsequent page references are to this work.
[3] Paul Cudenec, ‘Adolf Hitler and the zio-imperialist mafia’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/05/08/adolf-hitler-and-the-zio-imperialist-mafia/
[4] Paul Cudenec, ‘Zionism, communism and terror’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/05/08/zionism-communism-and-terror/
[5] p. 123.
[6] Dunya Mikhail, ‘Foreword’, p. xiii.
[7] Mikhail, p. xii.
[8] p. 17.
[10] p. 39.
[11] p. 40.
[12] p. 20.
[13] pp. 6-7.
[14] p. 60.
[15] p. 49.
[16] p. 96.
[17] p. 94.
[18] p. 97.
[19] p. 81.
[20] pp. 8-9.
[21] pp. 83-84.
[22] p. 87.
[23] Ibid.