Dreams can accurately reflect the dynamics of the social world.

Dreams can also be negatively impacted by forces of social oppression.

Some people are especially prone to visionary dreams about collective crises and concerns.

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........

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