Abstract Is it possible to dream together? This essay assembles an archive of collective dreaming that includes the art installation Black Power Naps (2015); Harriet Tubman’s neuroatypical visions of freedom that took hold during involuntary bouts of sleep; the dictionary of dream symbols that the ethnologist Charles Seligman extracted from colonial India; and Mohammad Malas’s film The Dream (1987), which documents the dreams of Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon. Against a Jungian conception of the collective unconscious that roots itself in a racist vision of prehistory, these reflections look toward dreams as they are interwoven with shared endeavors to disrupt the inevitability of white supremacy. While colonial historiography tendentiously minimizes the significance of sleep and dreaming, evicting them from the sphere of political rationality into the fringes of the private individual, this inquiry considers how these oblique frequencies of experience help to metabolize common struggles and disarticulate linear conceptions of time that conventionally orient History and the metaphysics of race.
Proctor et al. (Thu,) studied this question.