Dreaming of War

In the dismal light of previous research about dreams during times of armed conflict and totalitarian violence (including Charlotte Beradt’s pivotal The Third Reich of Dreams), we can sadly expect an outpouring of vivid, nightmarish dreams from a wide variety of people suffering catastrophic losses and traumatizing dislocation as a result of the Russian attack on Ukraine. In collaboration with Alisa Minyukova and other members of the Dream Mapping Project, an international group devoted to dream-art-culture collaborations, we have begun gathering dream reports from people in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and other countries impacted by the current war.

It is already clear the impact of this war on people’s nocturnal imaginations has been swift and severe. To be frank, the first dreams we have gathered are appalling. Filled with bizarre images, uncanny feelings, and shocking turns of events, they seem to be pushing the oneiric capacity for meaning-making to its limits, as each individual dreamer struggles to comprehend the magnitude of the destructive forces set loose by the outbreak of military violence.

Several dreams we have gathered occurred just days before the Russian attack on Ukraine. This one came from a Russian woman in her 40s:

One week before the start of the war, I dreamt that I rode into the Summer Gardens [a famous public park in the center of St. Petersburg] on horseback. All the trees are covered in frost. On each branch, there are bunches of roses made of ice. Everything is fragile and dead. In the midst of the branches are long, white candles burning with white, cold flames. Despite all of this beauty and grace, the dream was terrifying. I woke with a sense that horror was nearing.

The following dream came from a Ukrainian woman in her 30s from the city of Kharkov, an early target of heavy Russian bombardment. She had this dream on February 20, three days before the war began, and said she wrote it down because it was so disturbing. She and her daughter managed to escape to another part of Ukraine before the attack on Kharkov:

I dreamt of snakes. I will never forget it. They were everywhere. Crawling all over my daughter and me. She was crying and I was trying to calm her down. They were not biting or hissing. Just winding all around us. I felt helpless. But we managed to get them off us and escape. It was not a bad ending, but I woke up terrified. I wanted to know what it meant right away and even Googled it in the middle of the night.

Here is another dream that came a few days prior to the military attack, from a Russian woman in her 30s who opposes the war:

I dream I have been deported to Belarus. I am in a building that looks like a post office. It is very bright. There are flowers and the sun is flooding the floors. I am paralyzed with the realization that no one knows I am here. There is a clerk; I walk up to her and tell her in a nervous voice that I need to let someone know I am here, that I need to send an email through Gmail. She looks at me and starts laughing, ha ha ha, like in a David Lynch film, and replies “There is no more Gmail here.” I walk away in horror and understand that there is no more connection; no one will know where I am or what happened to me. I stand off to the side of the building and realize I will not be able to get a job, because I have such a low rating. In the dream I felt fear, helplessness and a realization that I have no power. I am lost.

For this dreamer, the authoritarian regime of Belarus represents everything she fears will now befall the people of Russia because of the war—a devastating loss of personal agency, social identity, and interpersonal community.

There is good reason to believe that presenting people’s dreams like these does more than simply document their sorrowful experiences. Mass violence requires dehumanizing one’s enemies, turning them into animals, monsters, vermin, aliens. To re-humanize each other is a direct expression of resistance against the social forces that enable and sustain campaigns of mass violence. This move towards “re-humanization” is precisely the effect of dream-sharing. The practice of sharing dreams, even in attenuated forms like this, naturally stimulates greater awareness of the distinctive qualities of other people’s inner worlds. It strengthens the capacity for mutual recognition between those from different backgrounds.

Anthropologists and historians have found evidence of dream-sharing practices in cultures all over the world, and many contemporary psychotherapists employ dream-sharing methods with their clients as a means of fostering emotional honesty and deeper empathy towards people who are different from themselves. In sharing dreams, we gain insight into the unique individuality of each person and also a more profound sense of our connection to every other member of humankind.