![]() ![]() If someone says, “You were in my dream last night,” it’s still basically an innuendo. People worry that in sharing their dreams, they could inadvertently reveal some shameful neurosis or deviant desire one of Freud’s most enduring - yet least supported - theories is that most dreams express unconscious erotic wishes. In a society that still sees dreams as frivolous, airing them aloud is considered pointless at best, self-indulgent at worst. “Those are the most boring conversations.” When I explain the topic of my book, people frequently offer their sympathies: “People must want to tell you their dreams,” they say with an I-feel-your-pain nod. ![]() In the Guardian, British writer Charlie Brooker claimed that listening to other people’s dreams made him dream “of a future in which the anecdote has finished and their face has stopped talking and their body’s gone away.” Novelist Michael Chabon wrote in the New York Review of Books that discussion of dreams is all but banned from his breakfast table, railing against them as poor conversational fodder: They drag on and on. Dreams came in at number four, right behind menstruation. On the list of tedious conversation topics, they fall somewhere between the five-day forecast and golf.” A few years earlier, radio producer Sarah Koenig devoted an episode of This American Life to laying out the seven topics that interesting people should never talk about. Writing for the New Yorker’s website in 2018, Dan Piepenbring began a review of Insomniac Dreams - a book about Nabokov’s relationship with his dreams - by apologizing for the topic: “Dreams are boring. “There’s increasing embarrassment around dreams.” Suddenly, they might be interpreted as signs of some latent neurosis or sexual deviance.Ī century later, conventional wisdom dictates that dreams are not a subject for polite conversation. ![]() “Freudian theories were spreading, and they were recalibrating people’s relationship with the dream world,” he said. Telling dreams, he said, was a way to create “a social bond between a vulnerable person and the authorities.” But he noticed that dream reports started dropping out of inquests and news stories in the 1920s, and he pinned the blame on Freud. When Shane McCorristine, a scholar of modern British history, went trawling through police reports from 19th-century England, he was struck by the number that contained descriptions of dreams: witnesses and victims seemed to make a point of telling police and coroners if they had anticipated a crime or a death in their dreams. ![]()
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