The Books Briefing: The Last True Private Realm

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.

They Dreamed of Hitler

By Gal Beckerman

A newly reissued book documents the dreams of Germans living under the Nazis, charting totalitarianism’s power over the subconscious.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Great Derangement, by Amitav Ghosh

Broadly, Ghosh argues, the problems of climate change are created in the developed world yet are felt most acutely outside it. Ghosh, who has seen the ravaging effects of tornadoes and monsoons on his native Kolkata, builds his series of interlinked essays about the history and politics of global warming around a double-edged storytelling problem that he says prevents the people in rich countries from grasping the enormity of climate change. First, because our common narrative framework depends on the past, many people still consider warming through a speculative lens, failing to recognize the severity, and urgency, of superstorms and sea-level rise. And second, that framework also neglects to assess the past, because it leaves out how centuries of extraction and domination by wealthy, powerful countries have made it hard for formerly colonized nations to be resilient in the face of rising temperatures. That’s the “derangement” of his title: the inability of our stories to change as quickly as our world is.  — Heather Hansman

From our list: What to read to wrap your head around the climate crisis

Out Next Week

📚 Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, by Michael Luo

Your Weekend Read

Ryan Coogler Didn’t Want to Hide Anymore

By David Sims

Ryan Coogler: “Yeah. It was always there, bro. Gumbo is spicy. It’ll make your nose run if it’s done right. The vampire was always the spice. Gumbo has to hurt a little bit. If you serve me gumbo that doesn’t hurt a little bit, it’s not right. The vampires were always there, because so much music deals with the supernatural. So much of it’s about being haunted by ghosts or dealing with supernatural creatures or having a rabbit’s foot or a mojo bag. It deals with darkness. It’s dealing with the id. And I love horror cinema; I love horror fiction and the concept of the vampire—everything about it made sense for this movie when I really started to think about it. The fact that they have perspective, that they’ve been around for a long time. When Remmick hears Sammie sing, he knows what that music is. He knows what it can do.”

Read the full interview.