How to Prevent Totalitarianism From Occupying Your Mind

The dreams of resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, and of those who did nothing

We’re gathering to explore “The Three Prophecies” from Jung’s Red Book today: Sunday, June 8th, 10-11am PDT / 1-2pm EDT. Register here for an immediate Zoom link.

Coming up this month!

• Men’s Group on Sunday, June 15th

• I Ching Community Consultation on Sunday, June 22nd

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I dreamt the other night that I was in a library of the Resistance. That word stood out: Resistance. I had a book in my hands and felt grateful to be there, in a corner of a small space lined with shelves of literature that I knew was helping those at war with the Nazis.

The next morning, before I made the connection to my nighttime musings, I began thinking about the newly re-released book, The Third Reich of Dreams, a collection of the dreams of people living under Nazi occupation. The specific dream that had entered my mind that morning was from resistance fighter Sophie Scholl. The night before she was executed for her activities against the Reich, she had a dream which she’d relayed to her cellmate.

It was a sunny day and I was carrying a baby in a long white dress to be baptized. The road to the church ran up a steep mountain. But I held the child tight, safe in my arms. Then suddenly a crevasse opened up right in front of me. I had just enough time to put the child down on the other side, then fell into the chasm.

Scholl interpreted her own dream as a guarantee that their work would continue, despite her death: “The child is our idea, and it will prevail despite all obstacles. We can prepare the way for it, even though we will have to die for it before its victory.”

I’d first read this dream in my friend Elizabeth Winkler’s review of The Third Reich of Dreams, and then in the book itself when I got my hands on a copy. In it, journalist Charlotte Beradt categorized the dreams that she collected by the relative relationship that the dreamer had to the State: Jewish people directly under threat, “active doers” engaged in resistance work, and “bureaucrats” being slowly broken down by the indignities.

The dreams of the latter group hold all kinds of fascinations, almost as if you can watch the sleeping gas getting sucked into their nostrils and penetrating their brains. One factory owner, for instance, had recurring dreams in which he struggled to raise his arm to salute Goebbels. In one of these dreams, after working to raise his arm for what seemed like thirty minutes, he finally succeeds only to have Goebbels tell him that he didn’t want to be saluted in the first place, leaving the man humiliated in front of his employees. In another of these dreams—the most telling—the man’s spine breaks as soon as his arm finally completes its ascent.

Resistance in these dreams is conveyed less through expressed conflict than by the physical struggle of the body. The man seemed determined to declare his allegiance to the Reich, utterly unconscious of the fact that another part of him was in fierce opposition, working to keep his arm down. His unconscious could not have been clearer: the cost of his obedience would be his backbone.

I was deeply struck by the contrast between the dreams of those actively engaged in resistance and those who were less, let’s say, woke. If you could measure each dream for its integrity, there would be no competition.

As poet Dunya Mikhail wrote in the book’s forward: “the battle for freedom is waged not only in the streets but also in the recesses of the mind.”

For those not actively engaged in fighting back in some way, the mind control of the State seemed almost guaranteed to seep in. The dreams reflected this takeover: people began to feel convinced that there was no point in resisting, that there was nothing bad to even resist. They just succumbed to the situation with casual acceptance.

In one of these dreams, a woman is listening to people singing a political song that, at first, sounds so silly to her ears that it makes her laugh. But by the end of the dream, she’s brought entirely into the fold: “Maybe if you’re singing along it isn’t so silly, so I sang along.”

In another of these dreams, Hitler is dressed in something resembling circus pants, chatting with people in a friendly manner, while the dreamer holds a pillow and comforter on which he hopes to relax. He doesn’t want to be identified as part of the “group of people who pretend to be asleep,” yet he also exhibits very little effort to do anything else. After watching Hitler for some time, he finally concludes: “Maybe I’m taking all this trouble to be opposed for nothing. Suddenly I realized that instead of a pillow and a blanket I had a collection box [for the Reich] in my hand.” He’d become occupied from the inside out: no longer even passively opposed to the regime, he began to work on its behalf.

Ultimately, the State found everyone; it was just a question of how, and how much of a person’s integrity was intact when it did.

Werner and Sophie Scholl, 1941. Photo by Hans Scholl.

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast.