The politics of the dreamscape

This study focuses on the politics of the dreamscape as a space contested by two archetypal modes of thinking about dreaming, one authoritarian and the other anarchistic. These modes, importantly, never exist in a pure form as either completely anarchistic or totally authoritarian— nor does one single political mode ever fully control the dreamscape. Each instance of the politics of the dreamscape is a complex and contextually situated blend of political logics. The chapters in this study attempt to break down specific paradigmatic moments of dreaming in order to identify and describe the precise interplay of political forces converging in and around them. Because of the complexity of each instance of dreaming, this study eschews an attempt at a synthetic history of the politics of dreaming or dream interpretation. Instead, it focuses, in detail, on a limited number of illustrative examples of the politics of the dreamscape that establish or reflect important and influential ways of thinking about dreaming, mostly in western Judeo-Christian culture. Within this structure, the analysis proceeds more or less chronologically. It begins by proposing an “origin myth” of dreaming in Genesis’s Garden of Eden story and ends with the dreamscape’s neurobiological “erasure.” Between these two poles, I investigate the multifaceted nature of biblical dreaming, the rise of Freudian psychoanalytic dream interpretation, and a set of modernist alternatives to the Freudian paradigm in the work of Philip Roth, Carl Jung, Jean Rhys, and Franz Kafka. This methodology reveals the different dimensions of the dream as a site of politics. Far from marginal or peripheral, discourses on dreaming, I argue, have been central to the operation and challenging of power.