This volume explores the relationship between oneiric and historical episodes of atrocity as depicted in transnational twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, film, literature and theatre. Examining the political and aesthetic power harnessed by dreams in increasingly 'dark times', it takes as its starting point the overlooked significance granted to the oneiric beyond Freudian psychoanalysis. By reading the oneiric within variously known cultural texts - including Holocaust fiction, world cinema, Bronx theatre, surrealist art and two collections of wartime dream transcriptions - the volume also offers a renewed perspective on modern and contemporary trauma. In so doing, it demonstrates the relevance of the oneiric, beyond the interpretative framework of psychoanalysis, as an aesthetic and political tool with which to alert us and respond to the violence of our contemporary world.

Foreword: Dreams, trauma and awakening - Max Silverman

Introduction: Reclaiming the oneiric - Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka

Part I: Dream images
1 Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity: Pierre Fédida and Georges Didi-Huberman - Nigel Saint
2 Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France: Emil Szittya's Illustrated Collection of 82 Dreams - Magdolna Gucsa
3 Dreams and thresholds: The violence of doors that never close in Magritte, Kafka and Buñuel - Michiko Oki
4 Condemned to oblivion: Concentrationary cinema and oneiric representation in Claire Denis' High Life - Rob Hether

Part II: Dreams as sites of resistance
5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann - Sharon Weiner
6 The Third Reich of Dreams: Resisting fascism through the oneiric unconscious - Emily-Rose Baker
7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom: Dreams and the dreamlike in Pose (2019) - Lydia Ayame Hiraide
8 Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peut-être (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg - Diane Otosaka

Part III: Violent states
9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye's Ladivine - Insook Webber
10 Dreaming the unthinkable: The cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos - Christopher Kul-Want
11 'My hell dream': Moving from trauma to witness in the nightmares of Bronx Gothic -Carolyn Chernoff and Kristen Shahverdian
12 Shit, blood and sperm: The Nazi perpetrator's hallucinations and nightmares in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones - Helena Duffy

Afterword: Archiving the oneiric - Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka
Index

Editors

Emily-Rose Baker is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film in the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas

Diane Otosaka is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds