Nuclear Nights: The Women's Peace Movement and the History of Dreaming

Abstract

This paper draws on materialist theories of dreaming to contextualise records of nightmares about nuclear war from the early 1980s British and North American womens peace movement, in particular the dreams recorded in Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirks book Greenham Women Everywhere (1983). Such nightmares do not only suggest evidence of collective dreaming but provide a remarkable case of the collective interpretation of dreams as they were taken up as a basis for political action. It concludes that in particular historical contexts, dreams can be especially visible indications of a political unconscious and, encouraged by feminist recognition of emotional life, of the unconscious as a political resource.