Dreams: Walter Benjamin

Though published during his lifetime, Walter Benjamin's dream notes and theoretical reflections on dreams are collected here for the first time in a single volume.

Dreams highlights a dimension of Benjamin's thinking that was invaluable for his writing and thought but which has thus far received little attention.

The first section, "Dream Notes," is a comprehensive and chronological collection of Benjamin's transcriptions of his own dreams and includes unpublished manuscript materials.

The second section, "On Perception of Dreams. Awakening and Dream," features his theoretical reflections on dreams, ranging from short aphorisms and longer analyses of dream literature and the history of dreams to the political conception of a "dreaming collective" and its awakening.

Editor Burkhardt Lindner describes Benjamin's literary approach to his

own dreams in the epilogue and gives

a sketch of Benjamin's own definition of the dream sphere, independent of and in contrast to Surrealism and Freud's interpretation of dreams.

This pocket-size reader presents Benjamin as both a great dreamer

and an important theorist of dreams.