Oneiric Witnessing: Dreamscapes of War

Abstract

Are wartime dream diaries a testimony to violence and its impact on society and culture? Do dreams shape and respond to history and the collective remembrance of war? This article argues that wartime dream collections constitute a testimonial practice that brings visibility to experiences hidden from the public domain and missing from dominant discourses on war. Connecting post-2022 Ukrainian dream diaries and theoretical contributions to cultural dream analysis by Charlotte Beradt, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Wilfred Bion, I argue that recognizing dream sharing as witnessing raises ethical and political questions because it is not a constative speech act, but a form of thinking about and action on history. Within this ethical–political perspective, sharing dreams is never merely about relaying contents to the reader but a relational act of self-disclosure. I conclude that to read records of war dreams is inseparable from being called upon to receive and offer hospitality to a dream.

1. Introduction: Dreams from the Frontlines, Clandestine Knowledge, Receptivity

Following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been a barrage of publications, radio programs, podcasts, and cultural exhibitions focused on documenting the war’s cultural and psycho-social impact, including collections of dream records (see, e.g., Al Rifai 2024; Juchau 2025; Krug 2023; Kurkov 2024; Stiazhkina 2024; Ukraine War Diaries 2022–2024; War Diaries 2023). Such collections of psycho-social and oneiric material have prompted scholars to ask why people are ‘turning to dreams’ to grapple with, to leave a record of, and perhaps to better understand their own historical experience (see e.g., Frosh 2024). In this context, it is important to reflect on the cultural moment that has prompted this public and cultural attention to dreams in the times of war, as well as on what kind of knowledge such dream sharing constitutes. By drawing on relevant philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives, this article probes the importance of the current practices of bringing dreams into public visibility and public knowledge as a case of affective witnessing, i.e., as testimonial acts that both emphasize the centrality of emotions and affects in personal accounts of mass violence and that stress the “intensive relationality of the witness” (Richardson and Schankweiler 2020). I argue that as an affective testimonial practice, dream sharing is a way for those impacted by mass violence, political turmoil, and atrocity to give an account of their experience in a manner that constitutes, for those who are readers and recipients of these dreams, a “clandestine knowledge” of history (Didi-Huberman 2017).

This text has emerged as a set of reflections about, and a response to, my own experiences of having been involved in the publication and translation of one such ‘oneiric archive’ from the war in Ukraine: the project Diaries and Dreams of the War, which was launched in March 2022 by a group of L’viv-based scholars and students. The project has produced a digital archive of dream records, as well as diaries, records of affect, poetry, music, photographs, and drawings.1 It has aimed at chronicling war as an experience that traverses and combines aspects of the extraordinary and the quotidian (Shumylovych 2024) and sought to contribute to the formation of the collective memory of the conflict by adopting a uniquely interpersonal and relational approach. In the words of one of its founders, it created “a special space of safety, where the participants would have a chance to find strength, words, and their own form of creativity” (Kolesnyk 2024, p. 11). By including dream records in the archive, the participants were not only ‘writing history’ and co-shaping the collective memory of the invasion while extending to each other care and support (cf. Ilchyshyn 2024; Shumylovych 2024), but they were also making an epistemological and political intervention by vindicating the cultural practice of dream sharing and presenting it as a form of affective witnessing to (and against) mass violence (see e.g., Kozol 2014; Richardson and Schankweiler 2020; Zembylas 2021; Richardson 2024). As Richardson and Schankweiler (2020) emphasize, the affective perspective on witnessing is based on the assumption that a testimonial practice is never limited to communicating certain knowledge, but that it is a form of relational encounter and engagement with others in which “bodies, environments, and happenings [become] entangled in webs of relations […]” and which, in turn, raises questions of response and responsibility of the testimonial recipients. In this article, I will argue that dream sharing, as an example of affective witnessing, both produces unique knowledge about the experience of war—like a ‘seismograph’ (cf. Beradt [1966] 1986), dreaming has the capacity to cast into relief nascent and not completely apparent social realities—and is a relational practice that is directed at and addressed to someone.2

Given the recent cultural preoccupation with dream sharing and with the creation of oneiric archives as a testimony to violence and war and, in other contexts, autocracy and political despotism (see e.g., Marche 2020; Smith 2024), the proposed reflection draws on philosophical and psychoanalytic discussions of dreams and dreaming “in dark times” (to use the phrase from Sharon Sliwinski’s 2017 iconic study of this topic).3 Through a reading of selected contributions to cultural and psychoanalytic dream studies of Charlotte Beradt, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Wilfred Bion, I seek to probe and illuminate the importance of contemporary dream sharing initiatives, such as the ones developed in Ukraine in the wake of the 2022 invasion. These authors help foreground dream sharing as a form of affective witnessing to the violence of war and the way such violence is imprinted on the psycho-social and cultural domain. To this end, in this article I develop the concept of ‘oneiric witnessing’ and suggest further that wartime initiatives of recording, documenting, and publicly sharing dreams can be thought of as testimonial practices. They offer unique insights into the impact of violence on subjectivity and human interiority in two ways. First, I suggest that these cultural projects of oneiric witnessing are disclosive speech acts. Georges Didi-Huberman has captured this dimension of dream records in Survival of the Fireflies, where he describes dreams as “clandestine activity” and “clandestine knowledge” (Didi-Huberman 2017; see also Dufourmantelle 2021, pp. 92–94). This means not only that dreams offer insights into how mass political events such as an outbreak of collective violence or authoritarianism affect and relate to the psychic unconscious, but that attending to dreams from the frontlines, as it were, grants their readers and listeners access to knowledge that, as Didi-Huberman argues, might be otherwise ‘hidden’ because it concerns our “inner experience” (2017; emphasis in original). Didi-Huberman calls dreams “puzzles hidden in the deepest depths”, which “can come to us—in glimpses [and] in intermittent flashes”, and in what he calls “fire-fly images” (and by which he means forms of knowledge that are incomplete, provisional, and disjunctive). As I propose, drawing on Charlotte Beradt’s ([1966] 1986) work, oneiric witnessing is based on dreamlives’ characteristic of seismographic visualization: dreams’ intensification and amplification of socio-political and cultural realities and their consequences that are not necessarily, at the time of dreaming, widely apparent or obvious. As Reinhard Koselleck proposed in his commentary on Beradt’s book, in the dreams that she collected, there was a historical “probability” that “exceed[ed] what appeared to be empirically feasible at the time they were dreamed” (Koselleck 2004, p. 10). Second, I also suggest, building on the work of Wilfred Bion (1970, 1979, 1997) and his contemporary interpreters (see e.g., Ogden 2003, 2004; Schneider 2010; Souter 2009), that sharing and listening to wartime dreams is akin to witnessing because it is never merely a disclosure of new knowledge, or a matter or dream interpretation; rather, it constitutes a relational practice of addressing others and being addressed, and called upon, by the dreamer. During dream sharing, the reader, or listener, becomes implicated in a subject position of a recipient of and a respondent to the dream. Disclosing publicly the ‘clandestine knowledge’ of one’s dreams is akin to confiding and entrusting a secret (cf. Dufourmantelle 2021). Thus, gaining access to dreams ‘from the frontlines’ differs from the accrual of sociological or psychological knowledge about the subject of war as such; rather, dream sharing involves not simply communicating an object of knowledge to others, but entrusting (something about) oneself to them. As I will show in my discussion of Bion, in sharing a dream with the other, the dreamer seeks not an interpretation but receptivity, whereby the other (the dream-recipient) helps them endure and withstand an unbearable and shattering experience (see also Frosh 2015; Alford 2018; Drichel 2024; Zolkos 2024).

My entry-point into the inquiry into wartime dream recording as a testimonial practice is Sharon Sliwinski’s proposal that dream sharing is a communicative political and ethical act. In her book Dreaming in Dark Times (2017) and in the project The Museum of Dreams, created in 2017, Sliwinski raises a series of questions about speech acts that are at hand when people bring their dreams into the public domain. This inquiry is particularly pertinent in the context of collective violence and social upheaval and The Museum of Dreams archives dreams that are dreamt against highly diverse background of mass conflicts, anti-democratic developments, the COVID-19 pandemic, etc. Sliwinski argues that what is distinct about oneiric communications is that they insert the “oddity” and “strangeness” of our dreamlives into the domain of public knowledge and discussion (Sliwinski 2017, p. 14). In turn, the acknowledgment of the collective relevance of dreams can help revise the dominant liberal conceptualization of the public sphere, which has been traditionally understood as an extension and product of rational language. Asserting the testimonial importance of dreamlives for public knowledge, discussion, and remembrance is thus a form of recognition that nocturnal subjectivity, i.e., moments when consciousnesses and rationality lose their controlling grip on the subject, is just as relevant for spaces of appearance, collective action, thinking, and historical judgment (Sliwinski 2017; Zolkos 2024).

The proposed conceptualization of oneiric witnessing in the time of war follows, and aims to bring more closely together, two theoretical trajectories in cultural dream studies. The first trajectory has been shaped by Charlotte Beradt’s work on the oneiric archive from 1930s Berlin, The Third Reich of Dreams (Beradt [1966] 1986), and the subsequent philosophical, historical, and psychoanalytic scholarship engaged with Beradt’s project (see Bulkeley 1994; Koselleck 2004, pp. 205–21; Didi-Huberman 2017; Sliwinski 2017, chap. 6). I focus on Beradt’s notion of dreaming as a seismography of violence, whereby she argues that in the psycho-social and cultural realm, dreams can bring visibility to the otherwise imperceptible and unintelligible aspects and effects of collective violence and authoritarianism. By documenting dreams shared with her by fellow Berliners (Germans and Jews), and which Beradt clandestinely collected and smuggled out of Germany (cf. Juchau 2019), as a seismography of Nazism, Beradt postulated that dreamlives manifest an extraordinary sensitivity to the “slightest effects” of political terror (Beradt [1966] 1986, p. 9). In other words, dreams make it possible to detect the “otherwise barely discernible symptoms in the multitude of daily events” (Beradt [1966] 1986, p. 16).4 For Beradt, dreams were never merely a representation of history, but a form of action or intervention into history. As a defiant response to violence, dreams affirm the dreamer’s political and ethical agency.

The second theoretical trajectory in the cultural and psychoanalytic study of dreams that this article draws on comes from the work of Wilfred Bion. By suggesting that Bion’s psychoanalytic conception of dreaming can be brought into a productive conversation with Beradt’s text and with the contemporary examples of wartime dream sharing from Ukraine (see my discussion of Yelyzaveta B.’s dream below), I turn to the problem of the relationality and receptivity of dreams. For Bion, dreaming constitutes an indispensable element of thinking in that he recognizes dreams as central to lived emotional experiences and to elucidating social and psychological meanings by the subject. Like Beradt, Bion views dreams as an activity of the mind that is deeply immersed in, and responsive to, historical contexts, but Bion’s work emphasizes more explicitly than Beradt does in The Third Reich of Dreams the relational dynamic of dreaming and of dream sharing. Not only did Bion elaborate how relations with others impact and shape our dreamlives, but he also presented the very act of sharing a dream—of bringing a dream to the other—as an act of self-disclosure. Sharing with others’ dreams ‘from the frontline’ is an invitation (and a plea) to ‘dream-with’: to offer one’s imaginative capacities to the traumatized subject who is unable to know or to dream their own experience of history (see also Baker and Otosaka 2023).

2. Dreamscapes of War: Yelyzaveta B.’s Bomb Shelter Dream

I open this essay with a discussion of a dream that was recorded as part of the Diaries and Dreams of the War project by Yelyzaveta B. on 9 March 2022. The aim is to show how the dream exemplifies what I have called ‘oneiric witnessing’, namely a practice of bringing into the public domain a disclosure of clandestine knowledge about the subjective experience of war that articulates both the subject’s extreme vulnerability and their ethical and political agency. In the dream, Yelyzaveta finds herself in the basement of her old university building, which has been transformed into a bomb shelter:

Rows of mattresses on the floor, colourful blankets that belong to students and staff, and scattered personal belongings. The mattress of M. […] is next to mine. The bed of my boyfriend [is further away]. The dream begins as if from the middle of the action. I find myself next to M., who came from the street with a parcel from his mother. We unpack the parcel and sort useful things: toothpaste, brushes, some little things. In addition, M.’s mother gave him bright and fine-smelling tangerines and a small brown book by Sartre. At one point, we realize that [L’viv] is being bombed. We don’t hear the sirens. There are no windows in the basement. But as it happens in a dream, it does not prevent us from seeing the bombs fall on the [ground], and a huge pillar of black smoke rises above the building. Collectively (as if I share my consciousness with all those around me), we understand that they will hit the UCU next, and we will be blocked under debris without an opportunity to get out. M. is sitting right behind me, and we curl up in each other’s arms, like those two prehistoric animals found in one hole hiding from the great flood. I am covered with M.’s body, his arms, and his torso; my hair falls on my face, and I can’t fix it because we are not allowed to move. We pretend to be dead, just in case the soldiers come in. I’m lying down, my shoulders ache from the awkward pose, but I see that my boyfriend is also hiding someone under him. I think that if some people dig us, like those animals, up after a while, they [will] understand wrongly: after all, logically, we should cover each other, not other people. I close my eyes and hear the walls begin to fall. I wake up in the middle of the night [in] the absolute silence of my Warsaw apartment.

(Yelyzaveta B. 2024, p. 215)

Yelyzaveta dreams an apocalyptic dream: she witnesses the Russian forces’ attack not only bringing an end to the dreamer’s life but destroying the whole world. Notably, the dream took place after Yelyzaveta had left Ukraine for Poland. By returning the dreamer to her invaded homeland, the dream thus implies Yelyzaveta’s enduring emotional connection to the place and undermines the sense of safety she might have achieved in the ‘diurnal domain’ by seeking temporary protection from war in a neighboring state. This suggests that even for those who succeed at finding refuge from war, it might not be possible to fully escape the violence of war, regardless of the physical distance from the frontlines, because one of the characteristics of complex trauma is a disjunction between being objectively safe and feeling unsafe (see Mooren and Stöfsel 2014; Masud 2023). Yelyzaveta’s dream affords her the possibility of living through an event that she never underwent directly, and that could not likely happen where she is at present. And yet, the dream makes it possible for the dreamer to experience her own and others’ bodily vulnerability in the face of technological warfare. That vulnerability is not merely represented in the dream, but something the dreamer embodies and lives subjectively. Reflecting on dreams as a historical material, Reinhart Koselleck (2004) elaborates the non-representational aspect of dreams—which is conspicuous in Yelyzaveta’s record—by distinguishing between the depiction and oneiric manifestation of history. The uniqueness of dreams for a historical study, Koselleck (2004, p. 211) suggests, is that they generate for the dreamer an emotional experience of violence without “[falling] victim to [it]”.

An important element of Yelyzaveta’s dream is the presence of others, some of whom feature indirectly, such as the friend’s mother, who is present vicariously through objects, furnishing the dream with material support and affective care (by gifting objects that include a philosophy book and tangerines, the mother transforms the shelter into a home). Others feature directly as Yelyzaveta’s companions, undergoing the attack together with her, and are central to establishing a relational orientation of the dream: people are never merely co-present in the shelter, but they are captured in the process of establishing embodied and emotional connections with one another. Their bodies are in constant reciprocal movement—clinging to, grasping at, or enfolding one another, in an embrace that is at the same time loving and violent, and that brings a near dissolution of corporeal boundaries. Yelyzaveta finds herself “covered” by (with) her friend M.’s body as they curl, coil, and twist around each other, evoking an image of ophidian bodies or entwined arboreal branches. This figure of twined and twisting bodies conjoined in a tight embrace helps understand war’s terror as a moment that blurs the roles of the protector and of the protected. The dream testifies to the impact of war as the elimination of the spaces of safety and as the breaking down of defenses mounted against the attack; the violence also manifests as an undoing of the body through the dissolution and collapse of cutaneous boundaries.

Borrowing from Jacques Derrida the concept of a pharmakon (Derrida 1981), I suggest that the language in which Yelyzaveta reports her dream pivots upon a pharmakon construction—the figuration of others’ bodies and of the shelter is simultaneously remedial and injurious. The dream condenses meanings that are at the same time salutary and ominous, comforting and threatening. While the image of “curling” bodies evokes intimacy, safety, affection, and pleasure, bodies that “twist” or “coil” carry associations of arboreal intertwining or coiling serpentine movements, which are potentially threatening and aggressive. Is the body being sheltered and protected, or is it being attacked and smothered? Alongside the pharmakon-like figuration of bodies, Yelyzaveta’s oneiric experience of an underground shelter also designates it as simultaneously salutary and maleficent. The bodies’ containment by and within the structure of the shelter epitomizes both an experience of security and of insecurity. The bombing transforms the protective structure into debris and rubble that, like a maleficent womb, threatens to crush and entomb those enclosed within. The figuration of shelter in Yelyzaveta’s war dream is analogous to how Wilfred Bion depicted tanks in his theoretical and autobiographical writings (see e.g., Jacobus 2005). Like Yelyzaveta’s bomb shelter, Bion’s tank encloses and contains the body with the effect of simultaneously forming a protective shield against violence and threatening to transform it into a smothering tomb. As Meg Harris Williams (2018) puts it, for Bion, the tank “takes revenge” on the body by “spewing forth […] the charred bodies of men from a ravaged womb”. Bion’s tank and Yelyzaveta’s wartime shelter are physical and psychic carapace structures amplifying human vulnerability in the face of military and technological violence; by seeking to immure oneself against violence, the subject can inadvertently expose themselves to it. Implicit in the oneiric images of bodies macerated and dissolved into indistinct forms and shapes is the threat of nuclear attack.5 It is particularly conspicuous in the image of corpses that have hardened into amalgamated prehistoric animals in a “deadly embrace” (cf. Rose 2004).6 The explosion fuses and fossilizes the bodies, violently undoing their corporeal boundaries and pressing previously discrete forms into one. Freudian psychoanalysis describes this moment as oneiric umbilicus; a nameless horror and a marker of trauma, when the dream’s reading “runs against a point of impossibility [and points to] limits of symbolization” (Tricot 2010).

Finally, the apocalyptic character of Yelyzaveta’s dream notwithstanding, it is notable that in a typical fashion, the unconscious also plays a joke on the dreamer and her mastery. The dream substitutes the lover with a friend, causing a confusion of bodies and desires as Yelyzaveta finds herself at the end of the world, but, as it were, in the embrace of the wrong person (not the beloved, but a peer). What further highlights the joke-effect is that she subsequently doubles up the role of the protagonist of her dream and assumes the position of its director, inserting into the dream a reflection that ‘the dream is all wrong’ and that she should be re-aligning its contours with the script of an apocalyptic romance.

If the dream shared by Yelyzaveta B. is taken to be a case of affective witnessing, even though it does not offer the reader a representation of an actual historical event, it touches on the distinction in testimonial theory between a juridical witness and an ethical witness. While juridical witnessing is concerned first and foremost with the production of factual evidence and “communication of knowledge” (Schmidt 2017, p. 262), ethical witnessing is not concerned with providing information and their speech does not offer an undisputable proof of historical accuracy. Instead, ethical witnessing is a form of acknowledgment of catastrophic history that is only possible through the lived experience of the speaker (Derrida 2005; Oliver 2015). The ethical witness thus has “an exclusive relation and responsibility towards the epistemic status of his utterance” and their utterance, “though it is a discourse, is particularly linked to the person who is testifying, to her first-person perspective” (Schmidt 2017, p. 268; cf. Moran 2005). My suggestion that oneiric collections, such as Diaries and Dreams of the War, are cultural and ethical practices of bearing witness to historical violence, relies on the distinction between juridical (evidence-based and information-focused) and ethical testimony, insofar as wartime dreams, as shown in my reading of Yelyzaveta B.’s dream, express a sense of the subject being thrust, or violently inserted, into that history. What Schmidt calls the necessary “autobiographical dimension” of an ethical testimony based on the witness’s “exclusive access to the truth of [their account]” (Schmidt 2017, p. 269), is thus all the opposite in situations of wartime dream sharing. Furthermore, as the previously outlined concept of affective witnessing emphasizes, testimony is not only an expression of a first-person perspective, but it also establishes a relational connection to the other as an addressed message to its readers and listeners. Derrida (2005) has famously argued that testimonial speech is premised on an epistemic uncertainty of its act in that the witness issues a plea to be believed. The utterance borrows its authority, as it were, not from historical ‘facts’, but from the witness’s proximity to the calamitous events and is thus intimately linked to their survival. Kelly Oliver, contributing to discussions of cultural trauma theory and to philosophical discussions of the testimonial ethics of intersubjectivity, has linked ethical witnessing as an attestation to “something that […] can’t be seen” (Oliver 2015, p. 483; see also Oliver 2001). Pertaining to traumatic memory, such witnessing points to a breakdown of representation through affect, silence, and gesture (see Felman and Laub 1991; Caruth 1996; Ball 2000; Felman 2002; Zolkos 2013; Atkinson 2017; Caruth 2017). My concept of oneiric witnessing builds on these insights, articulating dream sharing as a cultural and relational practice that brings into public visibility that which is hidden—a secret (see Dufourmantelle 2021). This is not only because dreams concern inner life experiences and affirm the dreamers’ ‘exclusive access’ to the ‘truth’ of those experiences, but also, as I show in the section discussing Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams, because dreams are visual expressions and amplifications of clandestine historical knowledge (Didi-Huberman 2017).

One thing to note here, before I move on to elaborate the concept of oneiric witnessing at greater depth, is the similarity between dream images and trauma testimonies discussed in the work of cultural and psychoanalytic trauma theorists (see e.g., Caruth 1996; Felman 2002).7 Among others, Dori Laub (in Felman and Laub 1991) has insisted that historically inaccurate testimonies must not be dismissed because of their ‘unsuitability’ within the juridical and factual discourse, by recalling an account given by a female survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau within the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies about the 1944 Auschwitz revolt, and which, I suggest, has a striking similarity to a dream image. In her testimony, the survivor gave an incorrect number of crematorium chimneys that had been blown up by the insurgent inmates (only one chimney was destroyed, and not four, as she claimed): “[a]ll of a sudden”, the witness described, “we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was incredible” (quoted in Felman and Laub 1991, p. 59). While for historians, the factual inaccuracy rendered the testimony ‘fallible’ and undermined the speaker’s credibility, Laub insists that what the witness testifies to is an altogether different knowledge, which was that, for those who had a lived experience of the camps, the revolt was an “unimaginable occurrence” and the “breakage of a [frame]” (Felman and Laub 1991, pp. 59–60). Rather than a constative speech act that establishes historical facts, trauma testimony (and, I suggest, oneiric witnessing) is performative: in the case discussed by Laub (in Felman and Laub 1991, p. 62), the testimony affirms and reenacts the ‘very secret of [the witness’s] survival and of resistance’; in Yelyzaveta’s dream, the unconscious production enacts the violent breakdown of protective social and material structures.

For Laub, it was the error or the inaccuracy in the witness’s testimony that enabled its disclosure of the hidden knowledge, which is precisely what happens in dreams (Yelyzaveta’s dream testifies to the vulnerability and fragility of life and of the body in the face of technological warfare, even though it is not an accurate representation of her experience—the dream points to war as an excess of what is possible, thinkable, and imaginable). Laub’s point is that trauma testimony reveals ‘hidden knowledge’ through an ‘error-image’—a warped, distorted, and displaced image of all the chimneys exploding; in Yelyzaveta’s testimony, the dissolution of bodily boundaries in the collapsed bomb shelter positions wartime dreaming and witnessing to traumatic history as proximate and contiguous. In both cases, there are ‘dream elements’ and a ‘decreased conscious efficiency’ (Bion 1979, p. 267), and a dialectic of knowledge production and knowledge disruption, or non-knowledge (cf. Didi-Huberman 2005, 2017). In dream sharing and in testimonies alike, there is a suturing operation, which consists of converting and linking disparate sensorial elements and emotions into a ‘war narrative’ or ‘camp narrative’. At the same time, at hand is also the dehiscing operation, which disrupts the narrative stitching and leaves an unprocessed traumatic mark on the dream.

3. Dreams as Seismography of Terror: Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams

An important text that presents dream collection as a production of a testimonial archive is Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams, which includes dream material she gathered among her neighbors in Berlin in the 1930s. Beradt ([1966] 1986, p. 6) presents these “political dreams”8 as a “parable” of a consolidating authoritarianism as the dream records chart the process of Nazism growing roots in German society on the threshold of war and mass murder. Mireille Juchau (2019) notes the testimonial orientation of the dreams collected by Beradt, which she describes as “witness account[s]” that were “hauled out of a nation’s shadows and into forensic light”. Juchau’s interpretation aligns closely with Beradt’s proposition that her oneiric archive constitutes a kind of psycho-historical “evidence”, which demonstrates how psychic life becomes ‘part of the mechanism of totalitarianism’ (Beradt [1966] 1986, p. 6). As such, the dreams are not only part of historical and political knowledge, but they also augment the collective capacity for judgment:

[they] might one day serve as evidence when the time has come to pass judgment on National Socialism as a historical phenomenon, for the seem to reveal a great deal about people’s deepest feelings and reactions as they became part of the mechanism of totalitarianism. […] But while seeming to record seismographically the slightest effects of political events on the psyche, these dreams—these diaries of the night—were conceived independently of their authors’ conscious will. They were, so to speak, dictated to them by dictatorship. […]

(Beradt [1966] 1986, p. 8)

Further to that, Beradt articulates the testimonial import of dreamlives by invoking the idea of dreams as fragments or splinters of history; “surrealistic mosaics” that have been “chipped from the reality [of] the Third Reich” (Beradt [1966] 1986, p. 8). Her notion of dreams’ fragmentary character differs, however, from the Freudian conception of dreams as disunified and overdetermined. While for Freud, dreams are “shreds and patches” of psychic life, for Beradt they form coherent scenes or vignettes, which intensify and amplify those aspects of totalitarian society that, at the time of dreaming, are still embryonic and “on the verge of becoming” (Beradt [1966] 1986, p. 6). As synecdoches of totalitarian society, capturing its emergence and consolidation, these dreams zoom in on and make visible what is not collectively discernable or knowable at the time of dreaming.

In his discussion of Beradt’s archive, Koselleck (2004) approaches the relationship between dreams and history through the question of oneiric temporality, highlighting the figure of prolepsis in relation to the dreams. Located at the interstices of fiction and facticity, these dreams make palpable and experience-able the terror that is (yet) to come. Dreaming becomes a form of historical witnessing through these anticipatory and amplifying dynamics, which in turn positions the practice of dream sharing as a disclosure of “a [concealed] truth” and of what has “not yet become empirically intelligible” (Koselleck 2004, p. 211). The material collected by Beradt does not represent history, as much as it is a product of a process through which dreams splinter off and register (like in a seismographic image) elements belonging to the order of violence and terror, which they subsequently displace and remold, and render them available for critical analysis, for thinking and judgment. Koselleck also points out that in Beradt’s book, oneiric life is not a site of the subject’s release or a respite from the everyday realities of an authoritarian state and society. Instead, she shows how political violence and terror ‘pursue [the subject] even into sleep’ (Koselleck 2004, p. 211), permeating and undoing psychic defenses. Sleep and dreaming are not exempt from what Hannah Arendt described as the defining feature of totalitarian society: the elimination of freedom from all domains of life.

It is important to clarify that Beradt articulates dreams as synecdoches of totalitarianism, not regarding their manifest contents, but in relation to experience. As such, The Third Reich of Dreams offers avenues for thinking about wartime dreaming as itself painful and oppressive. A dream by a Jewish lawyer recorded in 1935 exemplifies this well: the dream conjures a scene at a concert to which the subject had received a ticket. However, entering the hall, he realizes that he has no seat reservation (“my ticket was only an advertisement, and someone else was sitting in my seat”), (Beradt [1966] 1986, pp. 133–34). Feeling acute shame and embarrassment, he is paraded out of the concert hall and ejected outside the community of the theatregoers, giving the scene the character of a purge. The dreamer adds the following: “[m]any other people were in the same situation. With heads bowed, we all slowly left the concert hall by the centre aisle, while the orchestra began playing [Brachms’s Deutches Requiem], ‘We have no abiding home here’” (Beradt [1966] 1986, p. 134). In the dream, the unconscious also plays a joke on the dreamer (though of the cruelest kind): tricked into believing in his safety and belonging, the dreamer is turned into a spectacle of expulsion and forced to undergo a role-shift from a viewer into an object of disgust, punishment, and cruel enjoyment.

Situating Beradt’s text in relation to the philosophy of visuality, Georges Didi-Huberman draws on the notion of oneiric seismography to articulate a conception of dream images as ‘imprint-forms’ of history (see Didi-Huberman 2001). For Didi-Huberman, the testimonial dimension of dreams consists of their registration of historical tensions, affects, and forces that, like subterranean movements preceding earthquakes, are imperceptible without an apparatus attuned to their dynamics. While presenting the development of Nazism as a “haunted [and] haunting process” that touches on the “deepest level of the soul”, Beradt, according to Didi-Huberman, captures dream images as “subterranean movements—invisible movements, and even ones that cannot be felt in any way—whose intrinsic evolution can give rise to those devastating catastrophes we call earthquakes” (Didi-Huberman 2017, pp. 72, 68).

These dreams show

[…] how an inner experience, the most ‘subjective’, the most ‘obscure’ there is, may appear as a flash for another [une lueur pour autrui], from the moment that it finds the right form of its construction, its narration, its transmission. The dreams that Beradt gathered transform reality, of course; but that very transformation holds the value of clandestine knowledge, exactly at the point where a threat, of being represented [figuré], serves as an anthropological diagnosis, a political prophesy, as a heterotopic—but also ‘hyperaesthetic’—knowledge of the time lived in the day through the images dreamed at night.

(Didi-Huberman 2017, p. 68; emphasis added)

Didi-Huberman builds on Koselleck’s insight that dreaming is not a passive reflection of historical reality, since dreams never merely index or point to a reality ‘beyond’ them. Instead, they are a form of aesthetic and political action upon history. The oneiric image-appearance—dreams rendering history visual—are thus moments of potency and possibility, including for opposing the very reality from which these images come. Didi-Huberman outlines a dialectic of knowledge and non-knowledge in relation to dreams: they both disclose or make known what is covert and imperceptible in the present and they gesture at the unknown and the unknowable. Didi-Huberman’s intervention helps foreground the question about the place of the other in relation to dreaming and dream sharing that also puts into focus the different ways in which dreams are worked on and processed by Beradt, who solicits them, transcribes, copies, archives, preserves, hides, circulates, and (after the war) shares them through publication.9 Beradt’s own practice casts into relief dream sharing as a truly complex and multi-layered “communicative act” (Sliwinski 2017, p. 14). The intertwinement of aesthetics and ethics in this communicative dynamic further shows that sharing dreams is irreducible to representing or informing others, but that it pivots on an act of addressing the other though self-account or self-disclosure. Revealing the oneiric ‘clandestine knowledge’ takes the other as a point of orientation: to share a dream is inseparable from confiding something about, or of, oneself in the other.

4. ‘Dreaming-With’: Wilfred Bion and Dream Sharing as an Address to the Other

In the final part of this article, I want to probe deeper into question of the other in oneiric witnessing. To this end, I draw on the post-Freudian theory of dreaming by Wilfred Bion to suggest that sharing dreams means directing or addressing them to the reader (listener) and to ask about the effects and expectations that accompany such an address and what kind of response communicating dreams implies. Bion’s psychoanalytic approach is unquestionably different from Beradt’s cultural analysis of dreamlife; however, I still think that putting them into conversation can help elucidate the testimonial dimension of dream sharing and clarify its political and ethical dimension. What Bion and Beradt share, in my view, is the preoccupation with dreams as a form of knowledge and disclosure that also touches on the problem the unknown and unknowable in dreams. For Beradt, dreams form seismographic imprints that bring to light a social and psycho-social reality which is otherwise imperceptible and unintelligible at the given historical moment. Her work attends to the question of how authoritarian politics and tyrannical figures permeate their subjects’ dreamlives, amplifying affective responses of fear, horror, disgust, and shame. Bion approaches the question of dreaming and knowledge from a relational angle while situating his psychoanalytic study of dreams and dreaming in traumatic contexts. His core question is what makes thinking possible, which enables him to present the dreaming process as a form of thinking and to position dreams in relation to, and at the threshold of, knowledge and knowability.

The importance of Bion’s insight for the testimonial conceptualization of dreamlife in situations of war is due to his relational perspective; for Bion, dreaming always means ‘dreaming-with’ the other (Ogden 2004; Souter 2009; Brown 2012). Following Schneider (2010), I suggest that the subject shares their (wartime) dream not to divulge information, but to make an address and a plea to the recipient of the dream to dream together—a traumatic remnant—which is outside the dreamer’s capacity for psychic processing and meaning formation. As such, dream sharing calls for a response and a form of psychic and ethical receptivity (Weiss 2023), which I call here an act of extending hospitality to a dream. For Bion, dream receptivity means lending one’s imaginative faculties to contain—for the dreamer, or together with the dreamer—what they cannot process or think of alone. Such dream hospitality is thus also an expression of an ethical engagement with the other person’s pain (cf. Frosh 2015; Drichel 2024).

Bion’s relational approach coheres with Beradt’s notion of dreamlife’s immersion in and responsiveness to traumatic history. Neither Beradt nor Bion was a stranger to violence in their own lives; Beradt was a German Jew seeking refuge in the US in 1940, and Bion was a tank commander during World War I, who participated in the battles of Cambrai and Amiens (Bion 1997). Partly because he was grappling with the traumatic legacy of his own experiences, Bion defined war and what people undergo during war—being under attack, seeking shelter, sustaining injury, and seeing others come to harm and dying—by emphasizing their effects on the mind: war, he argued, causes a blockage to, or exhaustion of, the thinking faculty (cf. Souter 2009; Alford 2018). In both his writings and clinical practice, Bion thus recurrently returned to the question how it is possible to think when one has suffered war’s “mind-fracturing” effects (Souter 2009, p. 801). Brown aptly expresses Bion’s preoccupation as a question of possibility “to think under fire”, i.e., when affects and sensorial impressions do not produce psychological knowledge but overwhelm and threaten to destroy the subject (Brown 2012, p. 1191). This contrasts with ‘regular’ (non-traumatic) and operative dreaming, which Bion presents as part and parcel of the psycho-social processes of converting basic sense impressions into an experience, narrative, and memory. Dreams “render [sense impressions] suitable for storage [and for] memory” (Bion 1990, p. 47; see also Bion 1970) in an illustration of the operations of the ‘α-function’ that transforms corporeal-affective stimuli and imprints β-elements into material that is apprehensible in the psychic domain (cf. Sandler 2005; Abel-Hirsch 2016). Dreams are not to be understood as an object, but as a process that reflects ‘the primary psychoanalytic function of the mind’ (Schneider 2010, p. 528). Dreaming is an integral element of thinking, of the ‘pursuit of truth’, and of striving ‘to discover what is real about our experience’ (Schneider 2010, p. 522; see Bion 1970). Dreams are not ‘items’ brought to the analyst for interpretation, but they are always already interpretative—a form of processing impressions and engaging with the world.

The significance of Bion’s insight for the study of war dreams becomes apparent when paired with his earlier idea that the effect of war is the traumatic petrification of the mind. Schneider (2010) points to a key passage in this regard from Cogitations, where Bion (1990, p. 68) writes that, rather than metabolizing different sense impressions, dreams can also be a ‘sign of indigestion’. Diverging from the idea of dreaming as a generative and ‘garnering’ activity of the mind (cf. Green 1992), Bion suggests that trauma can impair the workings of the α-function. Instead, such dreams manifest as ‘imagery in the service projective identification’ (Bion 1990, p. 68; cf. Szykierski 2010), not as a ‘work-in-progress’, but as a ‘work-in-stasis’, a trace of the traumatic undreamt (Schneider 2010, pp. 532–36). This point is of particular importance for the study of the oneiric seismography of violence and war trauma, because Bion gives visibility to when there is a ‘breakdown of [such] emotional processing’ in dreams, which amounts to ‘stalls and limitations in the unconscious thinking process’ (Schneider 2010, p. 533). Wartime dreams can thus both show the formation of shared memory and collective meanings and attest to obstinate remnants of traumatic violence and to a breakdown of thinking.

Souter (2009, p. 795) elaborates this point by drawing attention to Bion’s personal narrative war and trauma, and in particular to what she aptly terms the “horror of psychic abandonment”.10 Describing Bion’s knowledge as a form of “survivor insight”, Souter argues that there is a link between the “horror of psychic abandonment” that Bion had witnessed on the battlefield (including its manifestation in the cries of wounded and dying soldiers for their mothers), and the theory of the containment/contained developed decades later. The mother receives the contents that the subject finds unbearable and lends her “capacity for reverie” to contain them. The mind in a “terrified state, requires [the] mother to deal with [their] feelings, and return them […] in a less toxic form”, as does a mind “under stress” that collapses under an overwhelming intensity of the lived experience of war (Souter 2009, p. 803). In this expression of dream receptivity, the other lends the dreamer their capacity for reverie, and takes in what is unbearable: the unthought and undreamt makes “a detour through the Other” (Ogden 2004). Bion’s theory of dreaming postulates the “necessity of the presence of another mind for psychic survival” (Souter 2009, p. 805). Invoking (and reworking) the Kleinian concept of projective identification, Bion proposes that the act of bringing forth and confiding a dream in the other is synonymous with an address, asking them to care for and offer sojourn (or extend hospitality) to a dream. The undreamt is projected outward and contained by the other. In this perspective, the cultural practices of wartime dream sharing and oneiric testimony, exemplified by contributions to the Diaries and Dreams of the War project such as Yelyzaveta B.’s bomb shelter dream, raise the question of the ethics of reading—of response, receptivity, and hospitality to dreams.

5. Conclusions

When we fall asleep, we suspend our active involvement in the world. The records and collections of dreamlives produced recently in contexts of war and foreign invasion, as well as mass incarceration, a global pandemic, and anti-democratic developments,11 prompt a question why, in this contemporary cultural moment, people are turning to dreams, recognizing them as psycho-social repositories of insight and knowledge. I have followed this line of investigation, drawing from Wilfred Bion (and from contemporary psychoanalytic scholars working in the Bionian tradition, including Thomas Ogden, John Schneider, and Kay Souter) to foreground dreams and dreaming as a mode of thinking (about war) and as a process of metabolizing sense impressions into components of subjective experience (cf. Ogden 2003, p. 17). Bion’s innovative contribution to psychoanalytic and cultural dream studies has been to elaborate dreaming as “thinking-in-progress” (Schneider 2010). Echoing indirectly Hannah Arendt’s proposition that the subject’s “withdrawal from doing” is the condition of possibility of reflection and judgment (Arendt [1971] 1978, p. 92), Bion depicts the oneiric suspension of active subjectivity as an opportunity to think (through dreaming), and of assigning meaning to what one has undergone. As I have emphasized in this article, my interpretation of wartime dream archives as a cultural and relational practice of ‘oneiric witnessing’ pivots on Bion’s proposition (Bion 1955, p. 225) that without dreams and dreaming, we lack the means with which to “think out” our own historical experience.12

Taking as its reference point initiatives such as Diaries and Dreams of the War launched and led by Natalka Ilchyshyn, Ihor Kolesnyk, Bohdan Shumylovych, and their students in Ukraine after February 2022, this article has illuminated the cultural and political importance of dream sharing and of the publicization of oneiric archives by drawing on diverse resources from continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, including theoretical perspectives on dream sharing as bearing witness, the oneiric seismography of violence, and Bion’s notion of ‘dreaming-with’. It has shown that the practices of collecting and sharing wartime dreams with others raise ethical and political questions and possibilities. By approaching dream records and communication as a speech act disclosing a ‘clandestine knowledge’ and a secret (one in which the dreamer asks both to be believed and for the dream to be received), I have suggested that the material at hand is akin to seismographic visualizations of war. Of course, dreams as war testimony do not produce a factual or ‘objective’ narrative of war, but (to paraphrase Bion) they make history personal, thus helping to recognize war as an event (or a set of events) that is (are) lived and embodied. As Koselleck (2004) suggests, dreams are never simply a form of historical documentation of horror, but they are also an enactment of horror. What emerges from reading the Ukrainian dream records is thus a strong sense of dreams as a meeting point between the embodied psyche and history.

To reflect further on the political implications of the proposed concept of ‘oneiric witnessing’, here I would also like to suggest that the wartime dream collection offers an important counterpoint to representations of the citizen subject that, in my view, have dominated narratives of Ukrainian society in the Western media and scholarship in the wake of the 2022 invasion (see e.g., Stepanenko 2023; Carlsen et al. 2023; Kudlenko 2023; Zarembo and Martin 2023). These narratives tend to focus on the efforts, intensity, action, and bodily animation and resilience underwriting national defense, solidary work, volunteering, and humanitarian assistance during wartime. One of aims of these narratives has been to present Ukrainians as a ‘political people’;13 for example, Timothy Snyder (2022a, 2022b) has insisted on the constitutive civic and participatory dynamics in the political becoming of a people, arguing that the broad public involvement and solidarity work in Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion exemplifies a performance and a practice of political people. Thus, he argues (Snyder 2022a), being a people is “about what you do every day, […] as a collectivity which exists […] because it is directed towards some kind of a future”; it is based on “asserting its own existence day to day”. While I agree with Snyder’s points, I also think they constitute a single threat in a more complicated story. Listening carefully and attentively to dream records from Ukraine creates a space for reflection that might be foreclosed by the dominant emphasis on action and by demands of war’s urgency. The civic subject does not only manifest through engagement in resistance and in humanitarian or defensive activities; they also emerge in times of withdrawal from activity and in moments of (enforced) inactivity and standstill (for example, in bomb shelters, see Schmukalla 2024; Zolkos 2024). Sleeping and dreaming are quintessential examples of such a withdrawal from activity, and yet, as Beradt has persuasively shown in her book, dreams do not necessarily offer a respite or a sojourn from war and violence. Reflecting in this context on the relevance of dreams and dreaming ‘from the frontlines’, I want to suggest that these oneiric collections enrich and complexify our idea of civic collectivity in wartime. In addition to Snyder’s account of performative and activity-centered civic nationhood, perhaps we can also think of bonds formed through ‘dreaming-with’.

By arguing that sharing wartime dreams with others and reading, or listening to, these dreams is a relational practice with both political and ethical implications, I have suggested that these nocturnal records, offered and entrusted to us as a form of war testimony, requires rethinking and reevaluating the place of dreamlives in political community, as well as acknowledging dreams’ heuristic and critical possibilities. Viewed in the light of Beradt’s conception of dream records as seismographs of violence and terror (and its interpretation by Koselleck), Yelyzaveta B.’s dream is not a representation of war, but an enactment of its subjective experience. Making her dream visible as part of public records of war is not akin to a presentation of an object, but, as I have argued, to confiding a secretive and clandestine knowledge. Following Beradt, I have argued that dreams render visible marginalized and unintelligible aspects of war experience insofar as they reside in the interstices of knowledge and non-knowledge. Approaching dream sharing as a testimonial practice (oneiric witnessing) requires the recognition of both the political and ethical agency of the dreamer and of their vulnerability.

In turn, Bion’s psychoanalytic perspective has been important to understand that by accessing that material, the reader comes to occupy an ethical relation to the dream. Bion’s notion of ‘dreaming-with’ throws the relational perspective on dreams as testimony into relief by presenting dream receptivity to an act of lending one’s own imaginative and thinking capacity to help dream the undreamt. Accessing dreams of people affected by mass violence is bound with an address to shelter the dreamlives of others. The act of making one’s dreams part of public records—of confiding dreams in others—is thus inseparable from a call to their readers and listeners to “offer a sojourn” to the dream (Schneider 2010; Brown 2012). This is because what war trauma leaves in its wake are the unprocessed, obstinate remnants of violent history, the “unbearable pieces of feeling” (Alford 2018, p. 46) that cannot be known and cannot be dreamt by the subject alone. Placing Bion’s theory of dreaming in conversation with collections and publicizations of wartime dreams from Ukraine has shown that in the contexts of historical trauma, dream sharing is never simply representational or ‘productive’. Rather, it involves depositing the unprocessed sensorial imprints of violence and addressing, or calling upon, those who read or listen to the oneiric records of war to offer hospitality to the dream.