Dream Images
by Rüdiger Görner

'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave/A paradise for a sect.' Thus opens The Fall of Hyperion by John Keats - with the subtitle 'A Dream'. The dreams of 'fanatics' weave ideologically conditioned utopias. We, the heirs of the 'age of extremes', continue to be painfully aware of what this implies.

But Keats had known of a different kind of dreams, too. '... Poesy alone can tell her dreams,/With the fine spell of words alone can save/Imagination from the sable charm/And dumb enchantment.' His assumption was that eventually one will know which dreams were those of ideologues and which those of true poets.

Dreams can be soothing or disturbing; the extent of their sensuality may exceed what we normally experience. Often, though, we ascribe to dreams a prophetic quality and read their images as a form of premonition. At the same time we know that we dream with hindsight, as it were. Dream images make us revisit past experiences albeit in mostly transfigured forms. Dreams seem to be a subconscious means for partially re-working the past, even though the process be one which we cannot chose, or refuse. Dreams come over us, or rather they emerge from within ourselves. Their images are configurations of our inner self and depth.

Critical reason approaches dreams with uneasiness. It cannot accept the poetic formula according to which life is but a dream. Instead it emphasises that dreams represent the self-abandonment of Man and the essential absence of reason. Dreams are, indeed, subject to a logic of their own, though rationalists prefer to dismiss the notion that there might be more than just one type of logic. The sequence of dream images can be curiously consequential and erratic.

The Romantics argued that dreams provided a symbolic 'analysis' of the world, the nightmarish conditions of existence, but sometimes also a pictorial contemplation on the redeeming features of life. Novalis, for instance, entertained the idea that the dream produced images of sensual reflection. Half a century later Baudelaire knew of dreams that were not only about abysses but abysses in themselves (Rêve parisien).

In Wagner's opera The Mastersingers it was Hans Sachs who argued (at the very time of the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal!) that Man's true yearnings are revealed in dreams; and the same Sachs refers to poetry as a mere Wahrtraum-Deuterei - an interpretation of true dreams. This thought was to become the starting-point of Nietzsche's bold attempt to speculate about the roots of Greek tragedy and its downfall. His point was the effect that the 'reality of dreams' produces upon the artistically- minded. In a sense, he suggested, artists permanently re-create (their) dreams, but they also invent them.

Yet Nietzsche's concern went further. He wondered whether there was any possibility of reconciling the critical rationalism of the Socratic world, as he put it, with the dream-inspired artistic sphere of life. The speculative synthesis he came up with (or should one say 'dreamt up!') included a Socrates who, at the end of his life, had a dream in which he was told to engage in making music.

Artists and philosophers have often been puzzled by the thought of what would happen to a rational being when overcome by dreams. Goya depicted how Reason in a state of sleep gives birth to monsters, whilst (early) Nietzsche regarded it as a prerequisite of truly humane culture that the appearance of dreams should be taken seriously.

We live a world of cinematic 'dream factories' and other virtual realities. How come we allowed ourselves to be laptopped? Much of our memory and imagination has been converted into megabytes. Are our dreams at risk? Have we, at last, created nightmares for them? Maybe the onging technological revolution is our revenge for too many unfulfilled and haunting dreams. Or have we reached a stage where we, again, begin to long for dreams as the last reservoirs of idyllic fantasies?

Who wants to be referred to as a dreamer in our smart and efficient world? Dreamers are not cost effective. The space-charge for ever-expanding dreams would upset any budget. Nonetheless we keep dreaming even if probably no one of us would open a speech by saying 'I have a dream' any more. We rather dream in order to forget what we have dreamt in case the dream contained symbols of embarrassing failure. As consumers we believe in the self-fulfilling prophecy of the media-dreamworld in which the only image that counts is an advertisement or the longest fantasy that can be sustained is reduced to a half-minute commercial.

The media have accustomed us to daily nightmares in the shape of news or horror-movies; the difference between the two is, at best, marginal. A century after Freud's legendary work on the analysis of dreams we know of the necessity to analyse the pre-fabricated media-dreamworld whose images inform increasingly our own personal dreams. The very stuff that dreams are made on is nowadays more than saturated with images. Our own imagination can hardly cope, let alone compete, with what we perceive. Reality, and its 'virtual' complement, have long surpassed our wildest dreams.

Therefore the essential question is: Are we still dreaming our own dreams? How genuine is their sensuality? What kind of 'truth' are they telling us? No matter whether they are comforting or traumatic, dreams provide transitory experience even if some, by virtue of a curious causality, may continue for several nights. In this respect dreams remind us of the transitoriness of our own existence.

Since the biblical dream of Joseph, and Homer's dream-like passages in the Odyssey writers, artists and musicians have worked on aesthetically appropriate and convincing representations of 'the dream'. But their concern has also been how to make their readers, viewers and listeners dream. Schumann's Träumerei epitomizes this effect. So also do Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, Hesse's and Kafka's writings, and Max Ernst's visions.

Whatever the artistic representation or individual experience, we should gladly accept being surprised by dreams if only for the sake of recognising that utilitarian functionalism, and its one-dimensional predictability, are by no means the only measure in life.

Rüdiger Görner is Director of the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London and Professor of German at Aston University, Birmingham.