They include the playwright and short-story writer Carl Sternheim, the author and doctor Alfred Döblin, the painter Toet Blaupot ten Cate, the publisher Adrienne Monnier and the philologist Gustav Roethe. In relation to these figures, censorship is rife. In the typewritten manuscript of one of the dreams from 1933, the references to Benjamin’s brother and to Döblin and the Sternbergian circle have been crossed out in thick pencil.25 In an earlier draft of the self-portraits, Jula Cohn appears as ‘the lover’ and then, under revision, simply as ‘my girlfriend’. In another early draft, it is Nazis who first storm a café and not a ‘mob’, as in a later version.26 In the last case it is clear that state censorship played its part, but the distortion of dreams should also be understood as psychic protection from the messages they carry.

When the energies of the night are wrenched into the day through the process of linguistic representation, repressed desires and wishes can no longer evaporate through a process of forgetting. Benjamin, in One Way Street, equates such writing-up with betrayal,27 for it is in the moment of transcription that latent desires have to be confronted. Just as the person who wakes up after dreaming betrays the night with food, so too does the writer who reaches for a pen. Censorship operates to protect dreamers from their dreams. Elaboration operates to capture the intensity of the dream-experience against the inadequacies of memory and language. But censorship has a limit. To an audience familiar with Freud, records of dreams become stark declarations of desire, arguably more exposing than the speech-act conducted between the analysand and the analyst. Symbols are read as pathology and, in Benjamin’s case, declaimed loudly in public.

The elaboration of dreams has never been a problem for interpretation or analysis, for it is in the telling and retelling, in the remembrance and mis-remembrance, that significance might be drawn out. It is through this act that the latent content of the dream (its wishes and desires) might override the manifest content (its details and events). As Adorno famously surmised, it is in exaggeration that psychoanalysis finds truth28 – and, to an extent, dreams are already exaggerations. Though dreams are universal, and their objects and images boundless in quantity and variation, in a formal sense they are fairly standard. When read as a literary form, they tend to disintegrate linear narratives. In this way, they represent a modernist aesthetic prior to the formal development of modernism, but this perhaps fails to fully encapsulate their significance. Everything that has been shattered under the conditions of modernity is shattered further by the dream and its transcription.

What persists through them is the suspension of natural laws: substances merge, physical laws are overridden, space is fractured, events occur without linearity, and nature – in one particular case – is absolutely reversed. Figures pass through walls, and lions do somersaults. In this sense dreams work against the hardening of law to provide images of redeemed (or, at least, another) nature.29 But it should be noted that these tendencies are not unique to Benjamin’s dreams. What is perhaps remarkable about the dreams here is how unremarkable they actually are. For, when written down as narratives, in their expression of desire outside physical, political and psychic constraints, dreams echo the general desire for a world that cannot so easily be imagined in the daytime. Benjamin’s attachment to the Jungian image of the ‘collective unconscious’ in ‘Convolute K’ of The Arcades Project, despite protestations of its proto-fascism,30 can be understood as an acknowledgment of this tendency. Not only do dreams operate against the status quo, but they do so through a universal or collective impulse.

This is not to say that the dream sits outside nature or history; rather, the propensity to dream is both motivated and constrained by such conditions. In the opening of the short sketch ‘Dream Kitsch’ (1925), Benjamin writes that ‘dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety – indeed, the range – of dreams’.31 Dreams shape history and are shaped by it. Dreamworlds are the displaced expressions of this world within a world of their own. It is imperative to read the dream historically, as that which breaks from the familial and from private neuroses. The content of dreams – if not sleep itself – no doubt transformed with each decade of the twentieth century, but Benjamin does not embrace the unbounded quality of the night-dream as a general and universal desire. Dreams are not simply open; they are desires conditioned, even ‘determined’ by history.32 They thus hold to the anxieties, banalities and brutalities of each epoch as much as they point to the destruction of those conditions. Their world is our world as much as it is its inversion, and it is in this double movement that their use can be found and mobilised. The process of recording dreams might congeal an unformed block of memory and desire, thereby betraying it by casting its original images all too starkly in language.