(5) I have adopted a notion from the contemporary synthetic approach to dreams: that dreams provide explanatory metaphors that comment on a person's existential situation and emotional concerns. Like many others, I have borrowed from Freud his insistence that dreams occupy an exceptional place in psychological and cultural analysis and his hermeneutic approach to dreaming, viewed as a symbolic language of the individual psyche, but in other respects my analysis is not Freudian. Sigmund Freud, of course, has left a permanent imprint on our understanding of dreams. A question arises: in what ways can we speak of dreams as 'stories'? And why do dreams seem particularly suited to serve as evidence of living under the terror?įirst, I explore these issues by reviewing the theories of dreams that inform my analysis. I treat reported dreams as texts-stories about historically specific experiences. In the pages that follow, I provide interpretations of selected dreams that have been drawn from the recently published autobiographical narratives (mainly diaries) that deal with the Stalinist terror. (4) In this context, political dreams, too, have been presented as historical evidence. Such publications can be seen as a massive effort on behalf of different people (authors as well as publishers) to open the daily, intimate lives of Soviet citizens-especially in the years of the terror-to the public eye. Many of them contain dreams most of the dreams that Soviet people chose to include in their personal accounts have political content. In recent years, personal accounts that purport to provide evidence of the Soviet experience (diaries, memoirs, and other) have been appearing in print in large numbers. (2) In a methodological essay on historical experience, Reinhart Koselleck introduced dreams recounted by the subjects of Hitler's Third Reich as sources that 'testify to a past reality in a manner which perhaps could not be surpassed by any source.' (3) And what about dreams from the Stalinist terror? (1) In A History of Private Life, Alain Corbin wrote of a dramatic change in dream content after the French Revolution, when political themes invaded dreams (even erotic dreams were politicized). Long recognized as a historical phenomenon, dreams may be of particular interest to historians of terror regimes.

Craftsman of dreams and nightmares