Collective Dreams on the Walls

Between 1933-39, Charlotte Beradt, a Berlin-based journalist, secretly recorded people’s dreams when living under the Nazi regime, which resulted in her book, “The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation 1933-1939”
(1966). The dreamers – from students and lawyers to housewives – were mostly oppositional to the regime. Some dreams that reflect how authoritarianism penetrates bedrooms appeared on the walls of Istanbul in 2021. Next to them were empty pages where people were invited to write their own dreams. Nightmares of the past resonate with the nightmares of today, congregating on city walls. We keep on listening to each other’s dreams of the past, present, and future.