Dreams of the Collective—Or How to Wake Up?

Abstract

Reflections on dreaming, recounted dreams, dreams as a means of representation—Walter Benjamin's writings are peppered with hints as to these strange activities that infuse our nights. One-Way Street could be read as an intersection on his long road toward establishing a theoretical framework for writing and reading dreams. The unadorned dream-protocols that punctuate the aphorisms were part of the original conception of the book, and Benjamin's ascetic refusal to provide interpretation or context for these dreams irritated even his contemporaries. But by introducing unmediated dream-narratives into his prose, Benjamin was in fact participating in a particularly vital literary form, the dream book, a form that becomes the representative form in the early twentieth century. Benjamin's dreams were published not only in One-Way Street but at almost the same time in Ignaz Jezower's Buch der Träume. The externalized dreams moving between two venues illuminate the deep mystery governing the very distinction between subjectivity and collectivity. As a dream book, One-Way Street offers the occasion to reimagine the limits of collective awakening.