Strange News from Another Star, No. 1: Reality
A collective research project
In 1933, the journalist Charlotte Beradt started reporting from the other world.
For nearly a decade, Beradt had been a writer for the Weltbühne, a weekly magazine based in Potsdam. It had started out in 1905 printing mostly theatre reviews and gossip, but grown steadily more political since. During the First World War, its mostly pacifist writers had struggled against state censorship; afterwards it started publishing proletarian manifestos. In the late 1920s it exposed the Reichswehr’s secret rearmament, for which its journalists were tried and sentenced to eighteen months in prison; the editor, Carl von Ossietzky, later received the Nobel Peace Prize. After the Reichstag fire, the Weltbühne was banned. Its final issue had already been printed; every copy was burned, and the plates melted down. Von Ossietzky was arrested; so was Beradt. She was released after a few days. He died of tuberculosis in 1938 after five years of torture in a concentration camp.
Beradt was released into a very hostile world. She was a woman, a socialist, and a Jew. There were no more left-wing magazines that might employ her, but she didn’t leave Germany. It was impossible for her to keep writing dispatches on the political situation, but she didn’t stop reporting. She started writing down people’s dreams.
Those notes were published after the war as Third Reich of Dreams. Most of the dreams she reports are anxious. Not long after the Nazis came to power, a doctor dreamed that all the walls in his apartment had suddenly vanished, with a loudspeaker announcing ‘the decree of the 17th of this month on the Abolition of Walls.’ Quite a few people dreamed similar bureaucratic instruments: other dreams featured the ‘Regulation Prohibiting Residual Bourgeois Tendencies Among Municipal Employees’ and the ‘Training Centre for the Wall-Installation of Listening Devices.’ A man dreamed that one of the cushions on his sofa denounced him to the authorities: it had heard him comment that Göring was getting fatter by the day. Other people were turned in by ‘a mirror, a desk, a desk clock, an Easter egg.’
A woman dreamed that all the street signs in her town had been replaced with lists of the words it was now forbidden to speak aloud. The first was Lord, in English; the last was I. An elderly maths teacher dreamed that the government was executing anyone who wrote down any mathematical formula, so she hid herself in a rowdy nightclub full of brawling drunks and half-naked women, and scribbled equations on a piece of tissue paper in invisible ink, like a spy, terrified all the while that someone would find out.
One of Berandt’s sources dreamed that she was on a peaceful family outing with her mother, eating cake by the banks of the Havel. Her mother carried a folder containing their genealogical documents: proof that they were fully Aryan and had nothing to worry about.
Suddenly a shout: they’re coming. Everyone knew who ‘they’ were and what our crime was. Run, run, run. I looked about for a hiding place high up. Perhaps up the trees? Atop a cupboard in the restaurant? All at once I found myself lying at the bottom of a pile of corpses with no idea how it got there—at least I had a good hiding place. Pure bliss under my pile of bodies, clutching my papers in their folder.
Years before the death camps, before the actual piles of bodies under which the survivors tried to hide, that future was already building itself within Germany’s dreams. And her dream contained not just the slaughter, but the deliberate ignorance too. ‘Pure bliss under my pile of bodies.’
But the most interesting dreams in the collection might be the ones that aren’t about subjugation, but complicity. Many women had erotic dreams about Hitler: the Führer would stroke their backs, dance with them, pinch their arses; he turned out to be a much nicer man than they’d thought. Most of the women who had these dreams did not support the Nazis; more than a few had a Jewish parent or grandparent. But Hitler would whisper to them that he didn’t mind that they weren’t in the Party, and he didn’t care about their Grandmother Recha or their big nose. I like this one; keep this one safe.
A woman who was born into a Jewish family, but who had been baptised as a child, dreamed that she was strolling with two handsome blond naval officers when they came across a fat, hideous Jew lying sprawled out on the street. ‘I think they’re absolutely awful, too,’ she blurted out. ‘I just can't stand the look in their eyes. But you've forced me, literally beat me into being one of them. I'm still not one of them, though.’ Then she turned to the naval officers. ‘Except that I might go to bed with one of you,’ she said.
Maybe the most revealing dream takes the form of a small fable. A man dreamed that he’d been instructed to collect money for the Nazis outside Berlin Zoo. He decided that he couldn’t be bothered, so he left his collection box at home, and brought along a pillow and a blanket instead. While he was relaxing outside the zoo, Hitler suddenly appeared, wearing ‘a pair of wrinkled but very conspicuous purple satin trousers like a circus clown.’ He starts performing for the crowds: making funny faces for small children, sternly lecturing the teenagers, flirting with old women.
‘I began to feel uncomfortable under my blanket and grew afraid he would come over to me as a representative of the group of those who pretend to sleep and would notice that I had no collection box. Meanwhile I was imagining what sort of heroic answer I’d have ready—something like: I may have to be here, but I do know about the concentration camps and I am against them.’
But Hitler doesn’t approach him. He simply sings a few strains from an imaginary opera called Magika, and the crowd applauds.
‘I thought, maybe he's not so bad after all… Maybe I needn’t take the trouble to oppose him. All at once I realized that instead of pillow and blanket, I was carrying a collection box.’
Third Reich of Dreams might be the most complete account we have of what it actually felt like to live in Nazi Germany. You could read a historian’s depiction, you could listen to first-hand stories from people who were around during those years, you could even leaf through their diaries. But nothing from the daylit world will ever express the feeling of living under a dictatorship so directly as these dreams. To find the truth of this world, you have to cross over into the other one.
What is it like to live in the present?
Lately, I’ve been having dreams about Liz Truss. Not long after our new prime minister blew a deliberate hole in the British economy, I dreamed I was at an orgy in an Italian villa carved into a high cliffside. This place didn’t have rooms, exactly, just a series of interlinked courtyards, colonnades, fountains, marble wreathed in ivy, staircases down to little grottoes where you could hear the roaring of the sea. Young people were lounging around in various stages of undress, smoking cigarettes, making eyes at each other, waiting for the party to begin—but Liz Truss was there too, disquietingly nude, with a camera crew in tow. (I remember that there were two of them; they both carried heavy TV cameras, and both wore head-to-toe PVC gimp suits.) She wandered through the courtyards, barging into people’s conversations with a microphone and a wonky grin, asking them to comment for the cameras on what a wonderful job she was doing as prime minister. Desperation glittered in her eyes. Most people shrugged or said fine, but when she cornered me down in one of the grottoes, pleading for me to like her, I said that actually I didn’t like her at all, and she was ruining this whole thing for everyone, and would she please just leave? The prime minister was utterly crestfallen. She ran away in tears, and I chased after her. I hadn’t said enough; I had to really twist the knife, let her know exactly how much she disgusted me. At least, that’s how I was justifying it. But I lost sight of her on the cold dark stairs, and as I kept running up I couldn’t find a way back into the villa either. Eventually I emerged at the top of the cliff. There was a high plateau up there, and a little town: a post office, a small church, a children’s playground. It was all in ruins. Hundreds of baboons had overtaken this place, a shrieking fury of apes with bared teeth and swollen red anuses. There was no way down. I searched for the naked white cowering form of Liz Truss. She was not there.
A friend had another Liz Truss dream. He’d been given a box with a large red button, and told that all he had to do was push the button, and the Conservative leadership election would be instantly undone; Rishi Sunak would be our prime minister instead. He didn’t need to think for a second: he pushed the button. What he didn’t realise was that this meant Liz Truss would now have to live in his home. She bedded down in a sleeping bag in his kitchen and ate all his jam. She filled his bathroom with her various hair care products. She wandered round the flat in a towel, leaving wet footprints on the floor. She was too friendly and too cheerful; she kept ordering big pizzas he didn’t want and suggesting they watch a film together. In the end he cycled down to Downing Street with Liz Truss stuffed in his bike bag, folded in half with her feet sticking out the top, waving and smiling like a moron at all the people on the street. He demanded to talk to Rishi Sunak, but the huge bearded cops outside the door of No 10 wouldn’t let him through. You made your choice, they said. You love her really.
Everyone else I know has been dreaming about disasters. One friend dreamed that she was idly eating a handful of thumbtacks, enjoying the slightly scratchy sensation as they passed down her throat, until a Victorian messenger in coat-tails rushed in to warn her that these were actually ‘thumbtack nukes,’ a terrifying new weapon developed by the Kremlin to be used in Ukraine. Everywhere she went, a crowd of attendants in formal dress followed, clearing the streets with their warnings. ‘Walking nuke! Walking nuke!’ Another dreamed, shortly after the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, that he was sailing a catamaran over the calm flat waters of the Baltic, when he received a text telling him that the entire sea was being experimentally replaced with a new substance called ‘water 2.’ Water 2 has a thick, jellylike consistency, and the boat couldn’t move through it, but he found that it would support his weight just enough for him to be able to walk back to shore. When he arrived, he found that there’d been a terrible mistake: water 2 is highly combustible when it comes into contact with the land. The whole of Europe was on fire: thick jellylike flames that wobbled high into the sky. He wandered through scorched cities, streets littered with bones crumbling into ash; he was the only one who didn’t burn.
My girlfriend had a dream in which the entire country was devastated by a terrible earthquake, the source of which had been traced to an ordinary semi-detached house somewhere in the suburbs of London. She raced to the house, trying to prevent the carnage. The house was still in one piece; all the streets were exactly as they should be, as if the earthquake had never happened. The aftermath of the disaster was indistinguishable from normal life. Inside that house, there were a small group of plotters about to push the button on their earthquake machine, and she suddenly realised that there was nothing she could do to stop them. They fired the machine. The world crumbled.
A friend is recently single. He dreamed that he’d given his number to a girl at the bar where he works, and she’d called him as he was walking home. Immediately, she started talking to him as if they’d already been together for years: telling him all about her day, about her arguments with her friends, some bullshit she’d had to deal with at work… My friend wanted to ask why she was saying all this stuff, but he couldn’t get a word in edgeways. When he looked up, the moon was unusually bright, glowing huge in the sky. He tried to tell the girl about the enormous moon, but she wasn’t listening. Looking up again, he realised that it wasn’t the moon at all—the moon was on the other side of the sky, the same size as always—but an entirely unfamiliar planet, and it was growing. This planet was about to collide with Earth. He kept telling the girl that they were all about to die, and she kept telling him about how everyone else at the office was secretly jealous of her. He gave up. These are my last moments, he thought: this inane drivel is what I’ll be experiencing in my final precious seconds of life. Then the planet struck, and he died.
My sources for these dreams come from the same general social group as Charlotte Beradt’s, the broadly liberal-minded urban middle classes—but our dreams are not the same. We do not live under the Nazis. There is no figure like Hitler to inspire the fear and hatred that, in dreams, can turn into a kind of desperate love. Our head of government becomes a slightly pathetic figure: Liz Truss is currently hashing out an austerity regime that will probably silently kill thousands of people, very soon, but in the dreamworld she’s merely annoying. We want her out of our orgies. We want her out of our house.
There is still something giving orders, but no Party to issue decrees or set up its fantastic bureaucracies. In my friend’s dream with the thumbtack nukes, the weapon had been built by the Russians—but who supplied the crowd of liveried servants that followed her around? Who decided to replace the Baltic with water 2, and who sent the text message? Who built the button that replaces our government? We are still not free, but the power commanding our lives has become distributed and invisible. These dreams emerge out of an order that is not a democracy, but not anything else either. There’s only the vague, distant, nameless fog that runs and ruins the world.
I had my own disaster dream: I dreamed that I got a new tattoo. Across my forehead, in neatly spaced Times New Roman, I’d permanently marked myself with the phrase GRAB A LARGE BOWL OF OLIVES. I stopped in front of a mirror, grinning, to admire the results, and suddenly thought: why the fuck did I just do that?
Last week was Yom Kippur, so I went to shul. My family find this very funny; they think I’m turning frum. I don’t think it’s that, exactly; I’m not going to stop eating treyf or operating a light switch on Saturdays, but something has changed. In 2014, instead of going to Kol Nidre, I snorted a good lungful of coke, had sex in a park in south London, and tweeted is it breaking fast to eat pussy on yom kippur. (It is.) This time, I fasted for the regulation twenty-five hours, and wore white, and repented of my sins before the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Kol Nidre is a strange ritual. We open the Yom Kippur service by repudiating all vows and promises we’ve made over the last year, and which we might make over the next. ‘Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths.’ (At my shul, it was preceded by another invocation, in English. ‘All vows, prohibitions, and oaths that we have made, from the previous Yom Kippur to this Yom Kippur—may we have the courage to keep them.’) Nobody knows exactly why we do this; it might have once been a way of renouncing a forced conversion to Christianity or Islam. For Christian societies, though, the existence of Kol Nidre seemed to indicate that Jews couldn’t be trusted to keep our promises. Once, Jews testifying against a Christian in court had to swear special oaths designed to overcome our inherent mendaciousness. Sometimes this was merely humiliating: in medieval Germany, the Jew had to stand on the hide of a pig, and say that if he lied, ‘may that sulphur and pitch flow down upon my neck that flowed over Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Sometimes it was outright torture. In France, any Jew making his case had to do so while a branch of thorns was pulled between his loins.
When I was younger, I couldn’t really understand why my ancestors had suffered all of this. Just convert! Why die? Why be tortured? Why not just drop that weird pedantic religion and live like everyone else? That’s what I was doing, eating pussy on Yom Kippur. I didn’t want to be a Jew, trapped in my ‘specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness.’ I wanted to be part of the world: to fuck under the open sky, to dig my fingernails into the dirt.
In the Talmud, tractate Berakhot 57b, in the middle of a section on prophetic dreams, it is written: ‘Three things are microcosms of the Olam Ha-Ba, and they are Shabbat, sexual intercourse, and the Sun.’
Last week, I took the Tube up to Finchley for Kol Nidre, and then I had to walk back. I live in central London, so it was a long walk. By the time I made it home, I was parched; my mouth was gummed up, tacky and sour. The law says that you can drink water on Yom Kippur, but only a cheekful. I took a big gulp from the tap, spat out half, and tried to swish what remained around my mouth, sluicing it through my teeth, trying to scrub out the rankness. It didn’t do much. One of the things you are permitted to do on Yom Kippur is reading for pleasure, so I read. I was midway through Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, which concerns a heretical Jewish sect that emerged in eighteenth-century Poland. I liked Tokarczuk’s heretics. The ordinary Jews in the novel are hidebound, stuck in the shtetl with their mud floors and their long serious beards. But the heretics are smart, smarter than everyone around them; they crack jokes, they travel the world, they get in various funny escapades. They don’t care too much about convention: they gorge themselves on fast days and swap wives after dark. They are intellectuals; they love to argue and dispute; it’s a game, it’s fun. They’re not averse to incorporating elements of Christianity into their doctrine. They remind me of myself: good secular perverts. The other Jews hate them, which feels familiar too: I’m reminded of everyone who ever called me a self-loathing Jew for my objections to Israeli apartheid or the hysterical Labour antisemitism canard. Their leader tells them that to reach the truth, they must first pass through the false religions. They will be baptised as Christians; they will shave their beards and take Polish names. And then, as the mainstream Jewish community start to denounce them with more and more fury, they claim that the other Jews have been murdering Christian children and drinking their blood.
That night, I dreamed that I’d been invited to read from the Torah for a Peter Thiel-funded think tank. I wasn’t sure why I’d accepted, but it was too late to back out now. A bimah had been set up in the middle of a park in south London, and the audience were already assembled on folding chairs in the grass, all wearing animal masks, goats and stags and elk. I had to carry the heavy Torah out of its ark, and when I opened it up and tried to sing, the words wouldn’t come out. My mouth was too dry. My teeth had turned black: mouldy rotten pegs. The animal faces stared as I stepped down from the bimah and collapsed onto the ground. With my hands fixed rigid by my sides, I dug in, desperately chomping at the soil, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of cold, damp earth.
I’ve been writing here for less than a month, and there are already several hundred people paying for it, even though I did explicitly tell you not to do this. I usually adopt a writerly voice that’s either lightly deranged or outrightly hostile, but I hope it’ll mean something if I drop the mask for a moment and say that I’m incredibly grateful. For obvious reasons, I want there to be more of you. But I also have some guilt about taking money from people: I would like to offer you something in return. People who know what they’re talking about tell me that the best way to get fat wads of cash out of Substack is to leave the main essays open to everyone, but charge for community features: mailbags, comment threads, book clubs, that sort of thing. But when I said I wanted to stake out a piece of the internet that does not work like the internet, I meant it. I do not think it’s possible to build any kind of community online, and I’m not interested in trying to do it here.
What I am interested in is dream sharing.
Matthew Spellberg is probably the most interesting dream theorist working today. Here’s how he describes a dream sharing protocol among the Ongee of the Andaman Islands:
Before going to bed, the Ongees narrated to one another their dreams from the night before, and their experiences of the day that had just ended, especially their time spent in the forest hunting and gathering food. But in doing so, they would negotiate the content of their dreams, modifying it so that everyone’s dream accounts might be gradually aligned with one another. One person might report having dreamt of fishing on the south beach of the island, another picking nuts on the west beach, then the first might suggest a compromise: We both went fishing in our dreams, but on the west beach.
In this ‘democratic dream-world,’ the Ongee agreed on how to carry out the real work of life; when they hunted or fished in the daytime it was just a echo of what they had done together in their sleep. Almost every society that’s ever existed has attached some significance to the practice of exchanging dreams, but not ours. In our post-Freudian twenty-first century, it’s a truism that absolutely nobody wants to hear about your dreams. Strange News from Another Star is based on the suspicion that this might not be true.
I hope to put out one of these every month or so: a kind of collective dream journal. I’ll continue to badger my friends for their dreams, but I also want to hear yours. I can’t promise I’ll publish all of them, just the ones that are interesting, or boring in an interesting way. Also highly encouraged are interpretations of other dreams, here or elsewhere, or dreams from art or literature, or your own personal crackpot theories on dreams. If you’re already a subscriber, you can contribute by replying directly to this email. Otherwise, you can send your dreams to samrkriss [at] gmail.com, with something appropriate in the subject line.
Please also let me know how you want me to refer to you; if you don’t give any indication I’ll probably default to anonymity and they pronouns. Absolutely anyone can contribute, but while this edition of Strange News from Another Star is free, a few of the dreams in future posts will be locked for paying subscribers. Which is, of course, a deeply cynical attempt to get you to click the button below:
So far, I’ve mostly been talking about the connections between dreams and the waking world, but there’s still a lot I’ve left out. Like the way dreams can magnify the things that surround us as we sleep. Thomas Browne: ‘A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest, a graine of sulphur kindled in the blood may make a flame like Etna.’ Or the way that dreams can be dulled by the routines of daily life. In the twentieth century, the Indian government started forcibly relocating the Ongee to industrial farms. In a few years, their way of life had almost vanished—but they didn’t attribute this to the bulldozed forests; instead, they said, they had been attacked in their dreams. As they told the anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya:
To do good forest work like hunt, we need to discuss dreams of the forest. We do not dream forests anymore! We are forgetting to work in the forest because we are reminded to get up and work in the plantation! We now dream only of the coconut plantation.
Uber drivers report that even in their dreams, sometimes they’re just driving endlessly around. They pick strangers up and drop them off, and don’t speak until they wake up.
Future editions of SNAS will take on other aspects of the dreamworld. There’s the spatial weirdness of dreams: those houses that always have one extra room, or which seem to be bigger on the inside. Or the huge empty caverns dreamed by Thomas de Quincey, ‘exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fit to receive.’ I’d like to think about dreams and time. De Quincey ‘sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night,’ which is not something I’ve experienced myself, but like almost everyone I have had repeated dreams in which I’m catapulted backwards in time, in school again, still fretting over my GCSEs. Obviously, there is also sex. There are the dream sequences in books and films and TV, and the way that dreams mimic our entertainment media in return. Some people’s dreams have cuts, camera angles, montages; others dream from the same first-person perspective as waking life. A few people—myself included—have had dreams in which the entire visual field is provided by the screen of their phones. There are children’s dreams, and the monsters that inhabit them. Ancient books of oneirocriticism; psychoanalysis; neuroscience. Animals in dreams, and the dreams of animals. (Freud: ‘Wovon die Tiere träumen, weiß ich nicht.’) Dreams of God, and what God himself might dream.
But spooky season is here; the leaves are withering on the trees, the nights are getting long, and obviously I’ve been thinking a lot about death. Dreams seem to have a privileged connection to the dead; in Homer, the gates of horn and ivory through which the oneiroi flood into our world are located close to Hades. Spellberg writes that in many Australian societies, ‘death doesn’t truly occur until a person is sighted one last time in a dream.’ Sometimes I’m visited in dreams by people I’ve lost. I can no longer really remember their faces, but in dreams they’re exactly the same as they always were. Sometimes I have dreams in which I die myself. Usually I wake up immediately, but not always. Once I was in a plane crash near the house where I grew up. Afterwards, I had to phone my mum and get her to pick me up in her car. She was very disappointed in me for having died. ‘We never thought you’d be the type to do that sort of thing.’ I lit a cigarette, and she told me she didn’t like me smoking. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it hardly matters now.’
SNAS II will be about dreams and death. Any dreams about the dead or dying, or distant ancestors, or the underworld, are welcomed. See you in a month.