Insights from Dreaming in a Time of Tyranny
Charlotte Beradt's "The Third Reich of Dreams" has many lessons to teach.
Posted May 6, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
The new translation of Charlotte Beradt’s haunting The Third Reich of Dreams is an important event for psychologists, cultural historians, and anyone interested in dreams. Among its many merits, this book stands as a milestone of modern dream research, comparable to Freud ’s Interpretation of Dreams and Aserinsky and Kleitman’s two papers from the early 1950s on dreaming 's relation to what came to be known as REM sleep. It has been a central part of my thinking about dreams for nearly 40 years, going back to graduate school when I wrote a class paper on Beradt’s work as seen through the psychoanalytic lens of D.W. Winnicott, especially his ideas around play and transitional phenomena. Following is a brief review of several ways in which The Third Reich of Dreams continues to influence and even anticipate the study of dreams.
Dreaming as a Mirror of Culture
The first major insight from this text is that dreams can be meaningful reflections of social, cultural, and political phenomena. The Third Reich of Dreams provides compelling evidence that dreams are not only meaningful in relation to our personal lives but also in relation to collective concerns shared by other people in the community. Although it may sound strange to modern ears, this has been a common belief about dreams held by people in religious and cultural traditions throughout history, all over the world. The Third Reich of Dreams reminds us of a powerful capacity of dreaming that seems to have been forgotten in contemporary times.
Beradt’s text also reminds us of how dreaming itself is fragile. Some of the most poignant passages in the book involve people for whom the external political oppression reaches such an intense degree that it disrupts and damages their capacity to dream at all, making them strangers to themselves. The Third Reich of Dreams shows that dreaming not only reflects collective dynamics but is also impacted by those dynamics, sometimes horribly and destructively so.
Along these lines, Beradt presents several dreams that portray with uncanny accuracy the emergence of new technologies for domestic surveillance and individualized persecution. When I first read The Third Reich of Dreams in the 1980s, I found it hard to imagine the bleak dystopian prospect of lamps and stoves and other household objects that can somehow listen to your private conversations, secretly record them, and send them to hostile authorities to use against you. What a frightening world that would be! And then…we opened our front doors and welcomed these same devices inside our homes. The nightmares of Germans in the 1930s have become the popular consumer products of today. The Third Reich of Dreams suggests this may not end well.
The Cultural Value of Big Dreamers
Starting on page 18 of the new translation, Beradt describes her most prolific participant, a young woman with unusually frequent, vivid, and politically sensitive dreams. Although Beradt does not speak favorably of her character, she recognizes that the young woman’s visionary dreams mark her as “the equal of Heraclitus’ Sybil… her dream characters and their actions, their details and nuances, proved to be objectively accurate.” (19) This woman is what we would now call, following Carl Jung, a big dreamer, someone who, probably since childhood , has experienced more intense, bizarre, and wide-ranging types of dreams than most other people. The Third Reich of Dreams illustrates the valuable insights that can arise by paying special attention to the dreams of big dreamers, especially in times of collective crisis and uncertainty about the future.
To close on a literary note, I would suggest that readers of The Third Reich of Dreams occupy the same position as Theseus and Hippolyta at the end of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream , when they overhear the four Athenian youths as they straggle back from the forest and share their oneiric experiences with each other. In the first line of Act V, Hippolyta comments, “Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.” Theseus skeptically replies, “More strange than true,” and he goes on for the next 20 lines to slander en masse the deluded behavior of “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet.” His speech is often taken, out of context, as Shakespeare’s ode to the supremacy of “cool reason.” But taken in context, as a response to Hippolyta’s comment about the unusually vivid and consistent dreams of several people, Theseus is evasive on exactly the point she finds most astonishing. A single dreamer’s vision might be dismissed as the fantasy of a madman consumed by a “seething brain” (V.i.4), but what are we to make of the shared experiences of a group of dreamers? This is the vital point, Hippolyta says, and she marvels at its implications:
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy,
But howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.23-27)
Along the same lines, Charlotte Beradt’s text is asking us to set aside the rationalist bias that dreams are “more strange than true,” mere random fragments of neural nonsense produced by isolated brains, and instead to look carefully at the recurrent patterns across the dreams of many people for insights into the conflicts and concerns of their wider community. Although born in the cruelest of circumstances, The Third Reich of Dreams offers powerful testimony to what I believe is a truly hope-inspiring capacity of everyone’s dreams. No matter what the Theseuses of the world—Theseii of the world?—say, we should not let them stop us from recognizing “the great constancy” in our collectively strange and admirable experiences of dreaming.
Beradt, C. (2025) The Third Reich of Dreams. (D. Searls, trans.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D. , is a psychologist of religion, Director of the Sleep and Dream Database, and author of numerous books on dreams, psychology, spirituality, art, science, and history.
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