On the Blind Resistance of Dreams

This article is an invitation to travel a few of the unusual pathways that have sought to approach the meaning of dreaming. The exploration suggested by Walter Benjamin is worlds away from the Freudian one. According to Benjamin, the secret nature of the dream should be protected. He considered the dream to be an encounter with oneself, “in a way that is impossible in waking life.” As for Marguerite Yourcenar, she attests to a poetic understanding of the dream, viewing it as a collage of images the sleeper “uses more or less capably to speak of himself to himself.” Dreams collected by Charlotte Beradt between 1930 and 1939 are a staging of the collective on the move, evoking the establishment of Nazi domination in Germany. Similarly, Frantz Fanon points out the political nature of black men’s dreams, which cannot be elucidated unless social structures are transformed. Finally, A. Adler accentuates the inferiority complex and the will to power, whereas C.G. Jung introduces the archetypal dynamic, compensation, and the interplay of opposites into dream analysis.