Remembering the Trenches at Night: The First World War in Dream Narratives

This article examines the significance and various meanings of the soldier’s body in First World War dream narratives, exploring how relevant they were to dream interpretation at the time. The violence of the Great War brought to soldiers new dimensions of fear and physical reactions that had previously been unknown: ‘war neurosis’ and ‘war hysteria’. These conditions were accompanied by traumatic dream phenomena, prompting the fledgling field of psychoanalysis to reconsider its view of dreams as wish fulfilment. Against this backdrop, published dream narratives often strive to find their own aesthetic language with which to express the novel bodily experiences associated with mechanised violence. They present images of the ‘carnalisation’ of the body, its disembodiment, and the complete destruction of its integrity. These dream narratives are also linked to the intensification of a belief in prophetic dreaming observed by contemporaries – a belief which was based on early modern concepts of an animated body.