Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, trans. Damion Searls Princeton University Press. 129 pp. $24.95

“Pay attention to your dreams,” I often urge my psychotherapy clients. Dreams tell us a lot about the way we process the world. Major political shifts can have significant impact on our dream life. Since the November 2024 election, for example, my own dreams have changed markedly; of late, I often find myself chased, jailed, silenced, and physically harmed. My family, friends, and clients similarly report an increase in dreams fraught with anxiety, often explicitly connected with current events.

In one of these conversations, a colleague pointed me to Damion Searls’ new translation of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams, which first came out in 1966. A Jewish journalist and communist who lived in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933, Beradt noticed that her dreams began reflecting her fears about the Nazi regime. Suspecting that the same thing might be happening to those around her, for the next six years she collected and transcribed these “diaries of the night” as reported to her by associates and neighbors, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. She was careful to keep her notes hidden from the Nazi authorities. When she fled Germany for the United States, she smuggled them out in the spines of books.

Once in New York City, Beradt began to sort through the collected dreams in search of overlapping images and themes. Her research revealed patterns of terror, thought control, shaming, and fear of conforming as well as not conforming—even the surreal, Kafkaesque fear of punishment for dreaming. Taken together, she concluded, these dreams reflected something like the collective unconscious of a brutalized and traumatized nation.

In conventional psychotherapy, dreams are regarded as symbolic reflections of the dreamer’s inner world. In his afterword to a 1982 German edition of Beradt’s book, the historian Reinhart Koselleck encourages us to look at dreams as documents of historical importance.

The dreams collected by Beradt clearly mirrored the invasive nature of Nazi propaganda and propagandists. In “The Dream of the Raised Arm,” for example, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels visits a factory. The dreamer, who is the owner of the factory, is in turmoil: he doesn’t know whether he too should give the Nazi salute. But while he is considering that question, he feels how his arm rises of its own accord. Similarly, in “Life Without Walls,” the dreamer discovers that his apartment suddenly has no walls. The “Wall Abolition Decree dated the 17th of this Month” has abolished all forms of privacy. Encouraged by her fellow exile Hannah Arendt, Beradt published The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation in English in 1966, with an afterword by the famed psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. The new translation, published in April 2025, features a foreword by the Iraqi American poet and writer Dunya Mikhail, who fled Iraq in 1995 after experiencing first-hand what it’s like to live under a regime of terror.

Beradt’s brilliant and prophetic project about the experience of living under fascism documents how people dream in totalitarian regimes. For us, it raises timely questions. How does a fascist regime infiltrate our psyche? How do we resist losing ourselves within a mind-melding cult of terror? Dreams are clearly a tool we can use to explore the private self, but fascism seeks to erase the autonomy of the private sphere.

Reading Beradt’s study today helps us become aware of the effects on our psyches of the current propaganda machine of corruption, lies, violence and hate. Her work has inspired me personally to explore ways to bear witness to the total collapse of our inner and outer worlds. In a project we call The Way We Live Today, a group of us have begun emulating Beradt’s work by collecting and archiving dreams from friends, family, clients, with the hope of broadening our sample further. In monthly dream group meetings, we share our dreams not as psychotherapy but rather as an act of archiving and as an extension of thinking. As the commonplace turns into the stuff of nightmares, the themes that emerge include fear, guilt, complicity, trauma, violence, intergenerational trauma, and catastrophic thinking.

Our hope is to create a space of resistance against what we call hypernormalization. While everyone knows that society is not working, most people refuse to acknowledge it because they simply cannot imagine anything different. We hope that dreamwork, conceived as an act of resistance, may provide a way out of this creative quagmire, into a collective ability to imagine alternatives that promote growth and connection.

Irene Javors is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with degrees in counseling, philosophy and history. A retired Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mental Health Counseling at Yeshiva’s Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, is the co-author, with David Beisel, of Forging New Paths: Essays on History, Culture, & Psyche (2024) and Genres of The Imagination (2021). Information about The Way We Live Now Project is available at: thewaywelivetoday.com.